Create Your Own Emoji!

Create Your Own Emoji is a two-page design worksheet for students in grades 3 through 7. A short intro explains that new emoji appear every year, that anyone can send in an idea, and that the Unicode Consortium decides which ones to add. Students start by listing four feelings, activities or things they think are missing from the emoji keyboard.

Next, they sketch each idea in a round frame, give it a name and a meaning, and test it three ways: Tiny (easy to see when small), Clear (easy to understand) and New (not already on the keyboard). The idea that passes the most tests gets redrawn, improved and colored in a large circle.

Page 2 puts the design to work. Students write a text a friend might send, draw their emoji tiny at the end of it, and ask a classmate whether the meaning comes through. They finish with an emoji fact card that gives the name, the meaning, two messages where it fits, one where it would confuse a reader and who would use it most. There is no answer key because every response is the student's own. Students work on paper from the color or ink-saving black-and-white file.