I love children’s stories that lend themselves to multiple ways for the children to engage with the story such as sensory play, whole body movements, pretend play, art activities, and more.
I have especially enjoyed The Colour Monster by Anna Llenas to help children gain a gradual understanding of emotions. Each emotion is beautifully represented by a different colour and different things we see in our world and environment: blue for sadness, yellow for happiness, red for anger, green for calm, and black for fear.
Children are active learners and I love to support young children in fully engaging all their senses when a really good story has captured their interest.
I found a wonderful free downloadable resource, emotions flashcards on www.teatimemonkeys.com. These are adorable large emojis for learning the different emotions. Thank you Tea Time Monkeys team!
I laminated these large emotion emojis onto coloured card to match the colours from Anna Llenas’ book, and we made an emotions wall in our preschool classroom. Just like The Colour Monster learns how each emotion makes you feel, because little ones are learning so much each day about working through their own feelings, I got plastic jars with lids and drew my own coloured emoji faces to put on each jar.
I put coloured sensory materials in each jar such as feathers, pom poms, bits of crepe paper. My preschoolers love sorting through the colours together, dumping them all out in a tub and helping each other sort through all the sensory bits and putting them back into the correct jar.
These sensory materials also help to support the children as they learn and develop emotional regulation and sometimes need a bit of time and support to help them process their own feelings. They just love choosing a colour jar off of our emotions shelf, holding their colour jar in their little hands, opening it up, dumping out all the little squishy sensory bits, squeezing, feeling, and holding all these coloured sensory little bits. They love mixing them up and then sorting them out again. Or sometimes if they just need a few minutes to relax, this quiet activity in a quiet corner is both engaging and calming for little ones.