A Children’s Book We Can’t Stop Reading

Also recommended is Today I Feel Silly (and all of the other Jamie Lee Curtis children’s books!). It is one of my all time favorite books for kids.

I read this book to my 3 year old son and he started crying at the end and said “I love this book” while crying and asked me to read it again. I’m not sure what it means, but it clearly brought out a lot of emotions in him. Anyone else have a similar experience?

I’m going to try and find that book here in Australia to have in my classroom. At the school I work at, we have noticed many children find it hard to express their emotions. One reason may be that they have not developed the vocabulary to articulate their emotions. Books like this are integral to supporting children’s emotional literacy. Do children in other countries face similar challenges? Thanks for sharing!

First time comment here! I’m Portuguese and today I also read that lovely book to my middle daughter! Fantastic to see it here, in the English version!

I am very happy to see so much interest in children’s emotional intelligence. Almost twenty years ago I wrote and illustrated a book called “How Are You Peeling?” to encourage children to talk about their emotions and develop an understanding of the emotional states of others. The subject has only become more important. If you are interested, check out what eeBoo.com has to offer. I have recently created “conversation cards” for eeBoo, called “I Heard Your Feelings”. Another set of conversation cards, “What Do I Do?” encourages conversations about social navigation, which of course involves a variety of skills, including social and emotional literacy. And there are more projects in the works… So glad to have been introduced to this site!

I’m late commenting but wanted to recommend the book for adults called “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys.” It’s super helpful to me in explaining how boys suffer from less emotional literacy even from a very early age in our culture. I’m working on changing that with my own 3 year old son! I have sent a copy of the book to a few friends with boys as well.
Now, off to read the 15 new tabs I opened just from reading this comment thread :)

I think it’s absolutely useful and interesting this Kind of Books. Something that could explain them what Kind of emotions they’ll feel along their life. Most of the time when you don’t recoignize a feeling or emotion, as you don’t have a reference, it could be complicate to manage.

I take note about this book (for when I’ll have a Child) ??

I just learned the nuance between jealousy and envy. It turns out, most of the time people are envious, not jealous. Surprising what things you learn as an adult that you never knew! So fascinating!

Envy is a two-person situation whereas jealousy is a three-person situation. Envy is a reaction to lacking something. Jealousy is a reaction to the threat of losing something.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/joy-and-pain/201401/what-is-the-difference-between-envy-and-jealousy

Loving all the comments!

Looking for suggestions on a book re: saying goodbye / difficult transitions. My 6yr old is going to a new school this September, and saying goodbye to her first best friend and school of three years. It was in this space that she learned to speak English, read, and grew from a painfully shy toddler to a confident child. Books have always helped in times of transitions, so I’m hoping this awesome community can help throw out some unknown titles (at least to me)!

I love this! I have been an elementary teacher for the past nine years and I truly feel that teaching emotional awareness and regulation skills are the most important part of our daily classroom life.

At my current school we use the RULER program from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. http://ei.yale.edu/ruler/ruler-overview/
It’s awesome because we create a mood meter with the kids and help them chart all different emotions. We work together to understand that no emotions are “bad”, but there are times we need to regulate our emotions or “move” to a different color on the mood meter. We use it a lot with music in my classroom. Last week a student reported that the Scooby Doo theme song put him in the “blue” quadrant, because he worried about where Scooby was!

Having worked with abused and neglected and behaviorally disturbed children, we often were told in trainings that boys in the US are taught to get angry and girls are taught to cry. As a response to almost any feeling. And we must work to change that. I find it super frustrating that few educators seem to do this. My son’s 4th grade teacher keeps saying “the boys are so sensitive and act like girls.” Um, no the boys act like boys. this makes me so frustrated.

beautiful and so true xoxxoxo i read your post to my 7 year old

We enjoyed a book called Goodbye Christmas by Author illustrator Gary Clark. We found it on Amazon a Kindle E book. It’s about loss, friendships around Christmas time. Compassion for the hardships of animals and others. It has the most beautiful illustrations in it. The children loved it

Do the boys describe themselves as feeling “brilliant” sometimes? That would be so sweet.

The book looks amazing! So this is a little off topic but have you been keeping up with the #metoo reckoning that’s going on over in the kidlit sphere? I thought you might be interested bc a lot of names have been put out there (including a lot of authors you’ve featured here over the years like sherman alexie, mo willems, matt de la pena) and i’ve been thinking a lot about how to address that. what do you do when your favorite authors are not as wonderful as you imagined? i thought about this a lot as a 20-something when i found out that roald dahl and dr. seuss were pretty racist bc roald dahl was my favorite author of all time. and now my kids love Thunder Boy Jr. and Piggie and Gerald and Pigeon and it makes me feel weird now to read those books every night and support these men. Would love to hear your two cents.

Our school district has implemented the “Emotional Tool Kit” as part of the curriculum, and it is one of my favorite things about the school. Not only are they teaching emotional intelligence, but I think it is a good equalizer, it helps the teachers in the classroom, and it is a great thing to use at home. I highly recommend bringing it to your PTA and/or your administration.
http://www.berkeleyschools.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Toolbox_Brochure_6pp_130801.pdf

What a great book! This would have been so helpful to me as a child.
I’ve got a five-year-old godson who’s a big reader, so I’m always looking for good books for him. The books section of Busboys and Poets (in D.C.) is my go-to. I recently found this one about how mistakes are invitations to imagine bigger, more magical things:
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Mistakes-Corinna-Luyken/dp/0735227926/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1520355354&sr=8-1

This book looks so precious! I got my degree in clinical counseling a few years ago and would have died to have a book like this to work with my kids and help them express their feelings! Now I can use it with my own little man… And throughout our journey with his heart defect diagnosis, I could probably use it myself :) thanks for sharing.

SO GOOD. Even as an adult I have so many light bulb moments in therapy as my counselor gives me language for my feelings and my experiences. I come in to her office feeling distressed, sad, or anxious. And as we work through it in a session, we begin to give voice to all the confusing things happening internally. I’m realizing how important it is to have language for pain. Otherwise, we internalize it and feel we’re strange or at fault simply because we’ve never sorted it out. Love this book and the idea.

No One Likes a Fart -Zoe Foster-Blake.
If you feel like laughing…

JEALOUS! ?
I am working on my first children’s book! This beautiful little book is just amazing, thank you for sharing.

Cup of Jo strikes again. Another children’s book I’m buying thanks to your recommendation. Love it!!

Hi!
Thank you for this post. I started reading thinking “I wonder if the book exists in portuguese”. Then I found it was writen by a portuguese author. What a joy!
Kiss
Mariana, Portugal

I love this so much! Anton’s honesty- and yours about not realising what he had been feeling. Also, Lora’s comment about how teenagers express themselves. I don’t have children yet, but I am a tutor and I see this in the kids I teach: girls going on and on about their feelings, often with surprising maturity and frank vulnerability, asking questions, digging deep even. The boys usually just shrug and want to move on to another subject. Yet one of my little boys, when he’s had a bad day, he always sits very close to me and leans on my shoulder. He sometimes says nothing, but others he just whispers ‘it was not a very good day’- and often, by the end of the lesson, through questions and little jokes and me talking about my day, I get it out of him. And we may or may not talk about it, but at last it’s off his chest.

Awesome book. This is a great way to children how to understand their emotions and the emotions of others.

Here is another children’s book about diversity, our military, and a cuddly pitbull!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ceceandroxybooks/cece-and-roxy-the-adventures-of-a-biracial-girl-an?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=Cece%20a