How To Do The Feelings Hotel: A Creative Emotional Check-In for Kids

Step into The Feelings Hotel, a place where every emotion gets its own room — even the prickly ones! This emotional check-in for kids is a creative way to help them notice, name, and understand their feelings, teaching them that all emotions matter and that they’re only temporary visitors. Here’s how to do it…

Feelings can be such mysterious visitors.

Where do they come from — and where do they go? Why do they even visit? Some arrive bringing warmth and blessing, while others feel chaotic and heavy. And a few are so uncomfortable that our minds try to block them out completely.

As a play therapist, I’m always on the lookout for meaningful ways to help children make sense of their emotions (not an easy task, for let’s be honest, sometimes I’m still figuring out my own!) Teaching kids about emotions isn’t easy. But it’s necessary.

So when I came across the idea of a Feelings Hotel — I knew it would make a fabulous emotional awareness tool for kids. Playful and gentle, I knew it would be a way to give children a safe space to “check in” with how they feel, welcoming emotions as guests who can visit, be heard, and move on when they’re ready.

Meeting the guests helps children learn how to name their feelings. And as for having a good rummage through their suitcases — that’s where the emotional gold is! — unpacking the important messages every feeling carries inside.

Creative tools like this are so powerful. So, if you’re wanting to learn how to do the Feelings Hotel Check-In with your kids – let’s explore.

The Feelings Hotel Emotional Check-In: Here’s What We’ll Cover

What Is the Feelings Hotel Emotional Check-In for Kids?

The Feelings Hotel is a gentle emotional check-in tool that helps children develop emotional awareness and regulation through imaginative play.

The idea is inspired by Rumi’s thought-provoking poem, The Guesthouse. In it he reminds us that we are like guesthouses for our emotions. And then he hits us with the powerful message that we should welcome every visitor, regardless of whether they are pleasant or difficult, because they all bring something valuable to teach us.

So think of this check-in activity as a space where all emotions are welcome — big, small, familiar, or confusing. Every feeling gets a room. None are turned away.

How To Do the Feelings Hotel Emotional Check-In Activity

Here’s how to guide your child through the process:

1. Set up the Hotel.
Print or draw the hotel and a few suitcases with emotions labels. Remind the child: “This is a safe place for feelings to visit. They don’t have to stay forever — just long enough to tell us something important.”

(If you’re crafty, you can easily make your own version of this with paper and markers — but if you’d prefer a ready-made option, scroll on down to grab the printable Feelings Hotel kit I’ve designed.)

2. Personalize the Hotel.
Invite the child to make a sign for the hotel using their name — for example, “Hotel Patrick” or “Katie Hotel.” This helps them understand that they are the hotel — a safe, welcoming space where all kinds of feelings can check in and out. It’s a simple way to help kids see emotions as visitors that come and go, rather than as something they are.

3. Invite an emotion to check in.
Then invite the child to let guests check in. Ask: “Which feeling wants to visit today?” or “Which feelings have visited recently?” Let the child pick a suitcase (or draw one) and choose where it stays in the hotel.

4. Explore what the emotion brought with it.
Ask gently: “What’s packed in this feeling’s suitcase?”
Maybe sadness has a memory of something lost. Maybe joy brought a drawing from school. Or maybe anger is carrying frustration about something that felt unfair.

5. Check in and check out.
Ask: “Does the feeling want to stay a while, or is it ready to check out?” Remind your child that emotions come and go — they’re visitors, not permanent residents.

Why This Emotions Activity for Kids Works

The Feelings Hotel works beautifully with children who:

• Avoid or struggle to talk about emotions
• Shut down or get overwhelmed easily
• Need help building emotional vocabulary
• Thrive on structure, safety, and creativity

Children don’t need us to fix their feelings — they need us to make space for them.

Naming a feeling helps calm the nervous system — but naming is often hard when emotions feel overwhelming or unfamiliar.

That’s where The Feelings Hotel helps. It gives kids a safe, external place to put their feelings — which instantly makes them less intimidating. Instead of saying, “I’m angry,” a child might say, “Anger is checking into Room 3.” That simple shift creates distance and insight. It helps children understand that they are not their feelings — they are the observers who notice them.

This is especially helpful for children who experience difficulty tolerating or talking about emotions (affect intolerance). The hotel becomes a safe “container” — a space where big feelings can visit, be noticed, and eventually move on.

(Want even more tools like this? Here are 21 play therapy techniques parents can use right away.)

What the Feelings Hotel Helps Kids Learn

As children use the Feelings Hotel, they begin to absorb some powerful emotional lessons. And the lovely thing is, this is done not through lectures, but through experience. Children will learn:

More than one emotion can check in.
Kids often think they can only feel one thing at a time. The hotel shows that it’s normal to feel mixed emotions — like being excited and nervous at the same time.

Emotions come and go.
By “checking in” and “checking out,” kids start to understand that often feelings aren’t permanent — they rise, speak, and fade.

Even difficult emotions deserve respect.
Some guests — like anger or shame — might not be our favorites. But every feeling has a message. The hotel teaches that all emotions are valid, even when they’re uncomfortable, because often they have valuable messages to bring us.

Every feeling brings a suitcase.
Feelings don’t come empty-handed. They bring stories, memories, needs. Helping children explore the “emotional baggage” gives them insight into where feelings come from and what they might need.

You are not your feelings.
By giving each emotion a room, kids begin to see themselves as separate from their emotions. That builds emotional flexibility and resilience.

Conversation Prompts to Use With the Feelings Hotel

You can gently support your child with open-ended questions and reflections like:

• “What type of room did this emotion check into? Was it a big room, or perhaps just a tiny room in the hotel?”
• “How long is this emotion going to stay for? A long-stay vacation, or just an overnight?”
• “What’s inside the suitcase today? – What type of things has this visitor packed?”
• “What do you think this feeling wants to tell us?”
• “Is this a visitor we’ve seen before?”
• “Do we enjoy hosting this visitor or is it not so pleasant?”
• “Can we thank this feeling for coming, even if we didn’t like the visit?”
• “How can we be safe with our body and words when this guest is here?”

These prompts help kids explore feelings without judgment — and they open the door to deeper emotional conversations when the time is right.

Printable Feelings Hotel Check-In Activity at Etsy

If you’d like to skip the crafting and dive straight into play, I’ve created a printable Feelings Hotel Check-In Activity complete with two beautifully illustrated hotel graphics and 16 colorful “emotion suitcases” — everything you need to bring the metaphor to life.

Perfect for home, classroom, or therapy use, it’s designed to make emotional check-ins simple, creative, and fun.

You can catch it right here on Etsy 👉 The Feelings Hotel Check-In Activity.

When and How to Use This Emotional Check-In Tool

The Feelings Hotel is a lovely intervention to use:

• As a daily emotional check-in (especially at bedtime or after school)
• In therapy sessions with kids who need a playful structure
• After a meltdown, argument, or intense moment
• With children who are neurodivergent or highly sensitive
• In the classroom as part of a social-emotional learning (SEL) routine

You can return to it again and again. It’s not a one-time activity — it’s a practice.

Adapting the Feelings Hotel for Classrooms or Groups

If you’re a teacher or school counselor, The Feelings Hotel is very easy to adapt into a wider SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) activity. Check out this wonderful free resource that builds on this idea. EmpathyLab has created The Grand Hotel of Feelings Story Kit — a fun, thought-provoking lesson plan where children set up their own hotel check-in desk. Some act as staff welcoming the “guests,” while others take on the role of the feelings arriving to stay.

It includes discussion prompts, story ideas, and extension activities to help children explore and express emotions through imaginative play.

Final Thoughts: Every Emotion Deserves a Room

The Feelings Hotel isn’t just an emotions activity for kids — it’s a way of saying to children, “Whatever you feel, we can handle it. Let’s make space for it together.”

It’s a gentle reminder that all feelings are messengers. Some are loud. Some are quiet. And some are hard to understand. But none should be ignored.

If you’d like a printable version of The Feelings Hotel to use at home, in the classroom, or in therapy, you can find it here. But feel free to make your own — because what matters most isn’t the design, it’s the connection.

Here’s to raising emotionally fluent kids, one visitor at a time.

More on this topic…

You might want to explore other fun ways to help kids develop emotional intelligence, right here on the blog:

• Externalize Anxiety – a creative art activity that helps kids confront their worries and figure out how to deal with them.
• Interoception – uncover this hidden sense and help kids understand how anxiety shows up in their bodies.
• The Worry Box Technique – a neuroscience-backed tool that teaches kids to manage anxiety and build resilience, one worry at a time.
• The Magic of Guided Meditation for Kids – learn how gentle, imaginative journeys help children relax, manage stress, and build inner calm.

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