Celebrate World Emoji Day

July 5, 2024 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

July 17 is celebrated as World Emoji Day (because July 17 is the day shown on the calendar emoji) and it’s the perfect day to plan a little emoji fun.

Emojis can be a way to talk about emotions, but they can also just be fun!

Do some easy drawing with the printable complete the emoji drawing activity from Look We’re Learning.

How well can you tell emojis apart? Test your powers of perception with an I spy emoji game printable from Paper Trail Design. Create Craft Love has a printable emoji bingo game, or you can make an emotional spin on Twister with this party game idea from The Activity Mom.

Make paper plate emoji masks with this crafty idea from Natural Beach Living. Or grab some fun emoji coloring pages from Cool 2B Kids for car rides and other times you need a quiet activity.

This optical illusion emoji spinner is a lot of fun to make, and you probably already have the supplies you need at home to make it. Grab the tutorial from Jane Hayes Creative.

Use yellow cups (or paint some yellow) and the printable from 10 Minutes of Quality Time to make a spinning emoji cup. You can also draw in your own favorite emojis if they aren’t included on the printable.

Speaking of favorite emojis, another fun activity would be to design your own emjoi. Is there something you love that you think needs a symbol (for me it’s knitting!)? Or a favorite food that’s missing from the lineup? Have kids (and adults!) design their own emoji and write or talk about why they picked what they did. You can even vote on which ones you’d like to see made into real emojis. Teach Simple has a printable on making your own emoji, or you can just draw it on regular paper.

Play guess the emoji! Do you really know what that emoji means? Check out this list from SmartPrix to see if that symbol means what you think it means. There are lots of emjoi quizzes online, but you can also make your own, where you use emjois to describe the name or plot of a book or movie and see if other people can guess what it is. Sort of like Pictionary without the drawing (and you don’t even have to be in the same room!).

Talk about Emotions with Emoji Playdough

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Book Review: Rise Up!

It might seem weird to feature a book about protest movements around the Fourth of July, but as Rise Up! Powerful Protests in American History reminds us, protest is patriotic and part of the very fabric of American life from the beginning.

This picture book, written by history teacher Rachel C. Katz and illustrated by Sophie Bass, tells a rhyming story of how Americans have stood up throughout the nation’s history to protest and spread the word about injustice and unsafe conditions. From the Boston Tea Party to modern movements like the Standing Rock pipeline protests and the Obergefell case, it touches on women’s rights, environmental activism, civil rights, Pride, access for disabled people and more.

The illustrations, often based on historic protest signs and artwork, help tell the stories, while a timeline, map, and overview of each event for further discussion. Readers will learn about Silent Spring and The Jungle, the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike, the Seneca Falls convention, Robert Smalls, the Delano Grape Strike and the movement to un-dam the Klamath River, to name a few.

Each event includes a few bullet points to provide context about what happened, why and what the result was. The book reminds readers that protests are not always effective, or don’t always get the people involved what they want right away (since it took women 72 years to get the right to vote after Seneca Falls, for example).

This book is a great way to introduce kids to the long and proud history of protest movements in the United States and could prompt discussions about current events and things happening that they might want to see changed. It could also be used to start kids researching different protests discussed in the book for further learning. You can talk about how art can educate people and encourage kids to make their own art pieces to educate others about something important to them.

Rise Up! is a great starting point for learning about the history of protest and the effects it has had on American history. The publisher’s website has more resources for teaching with this book at the link below.

About the book: 48 pages, hardcover. Published 2025 by Barefoot Books. Suggested retail price $17.99.

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