The Unbudgeable Curmudgeon and Identifying your Emotions through Color

Emotions come in all shapes and sizes...even colors! Reading about and discussing emotions with children is such an important part of their growth and development.

Sharing books with your child(ren) that contain relatable characters and scenarios are an easy way to bridge this often challenging topic. Children have big emotions, and can not always verbalize what their feeling are, in the same way adults can. Using books that feature metaphors to represent feelings, helps the child(ren) to visualize the abstract concept with something they can understand (monsters or the use of color)

In their brand new book, author Matthew Burgess and illustrator Fiona Woodcock give a human character's emotions and feelings a personality and shape all of it's own. Eventually, the larger than life curmudgeon calms down back into their regular own (human) form.

Social Emotional Learning is a large part of the elementary school curriculum. Students are now taught about why they feel the way they do, how they can hone their big emotions and work through them in a productive manner.

Just like in the Pixar film Inside Out, we are not just one emotion, we are made up of many and some of these emotions, students (and adults) need help and practice knowing how to use. In her work with Social Emotional Learning, Leah Kuypers created the Zones of Regulation--a program designed to assign a color to four common emotional "zones" that any given person could be in. This has been a great help to the students in my class and has even  helped me understand my two year old's ever-changing mood;-)

Here are a few more books that I have used to help introduce The Zones of Regulation and talk about feelings and emotions:

Such a beautiful book of Dr. Seuss's words brought to life by Johnson and Fancher. I've used this book as a read aloud on the first day of school to help get kids to visualize their first day jitters. We follow this up with a little water color painting. It's a great way to get kids thinking and creating on the first day!

Such a great book to explain the stages of anger--the author/illustrator uses large brush strokes to depict movement and color to show the anger diffusing and Sophie returning to calmness. 

Another EXCELLENT choice for explaining the process of emotional response. Allie becomes a monster and her brother helps her move through the emotional process with breathing and calming exercises. Each time she succeeds with a phase she "sheds" a layer of monster.
So clever!