EMOTIONAL LITERACY is the first step towards building your emotional intelligence. It is the ability to recognize, understand and appropriately express our emotions. It is an essential skill that we must work to develop.

It helps to teach ways to deal with emotion in the classroom. Signs and posters around the room are good reminders of how students should handle situations and control their emotions.

People of all ages deal with emotion. Younger students may not recognize all emotions or know how to deal with them. It is good to expose children to emotion vocabulary and definition. This will lead to them having a better understanding of context in life and literacy.

Students need to be able to get a sense and feel for emotion when they are reading. Letters are a good way to extract emotion from. This skill will be useful as students read books. They will be able to use character's emotions to help better understand and comprehend a story.

Times are changing. Much of communication today is through texting or instant messaging. How can we read into emotion with this type of communication? It is difficult to get a sense of voice from this form of literacy.

Much of emotional literacy today can be found in social media. Many people express their emotions via facebook and twitter or even through an email. This is documentation of emotion. It could be a healthy way to vent, although it could be dangerous.

Blogging is also a rising trend. Many people blog to post their opinions and feelings. I personally have a poetry blog. Poetry is also a big genre that relates to emotional literacy.

Emotions are an integral part of human nature. Through emotions we respond to life in many different ways -- with anger, happiness, fear, love and loneliness. Emotions influence our thoughts and actions; they inspire our needs; they affect our bodies and impact on our relationships.

A recent poll by USA Today showed that, when asked what they most wanted to change in their children's schools, a full 75% of all parents asked for emotional literacy - though not by name. Parents' most frequent request (36%) was the desire for more school counselors - a need alleviated by Emotional Literacy education. The second greatest request (33%) was the desire for emotional diagnosis of our kids before it was 'too late.' The third most prolific desire was to insure our kids are taught not to hate (18%).

Emotional Literacy programmes enable children to learn the skills and abilities that give them greater emotional awareness, more emotional control and strong relationship building skills. Emotional literacy is good for our mental health and can help alleviate situations like this.