This book is a wonderful story about a “Color Monster” who is full of mixed up colors and emotions. A little girl takes the monster by the hand and gently helps the Color Monster untangle and separate out all of these feelings and put them into jars.

The Color Monster is a children’s book by Anna Llenas about a confused and overwhelmed monster who learns to sort his emotions with the help of a little girl. The book is often used to teach children about managing their emotions and different ways to visualize how we feel. In this story, yellow refers to happiness, red is for anger and blue is linked to sadness. Do you agree with those colour choices? Why? As a group, we discussed the interesting allocation of colour to the different emotions. Children who are particularly struggling could simply assign themselves a colour for their feeling. However, I wonder how useful this colour allocation is, as some children might have a favourite colour associated with a negative emotion. Think of other emotions and choose colours that might represent them (e.g. frustration, disgust, envy). Read the book, The Color Monster. Use the questions above or your own questions to help facilitate a discussion on how artists use color to express feelings. Step 2: Draw EyesThis drawing is great because there really is no wrong way to do it! Most kids will feel successful and proud of their silly (or serious) artworks. It also allows them to be a little silly and what kid doesn’t love that? Start With The Eyes Read The Color Monster book to students. Take another look through the book – noticing the color used to represent each emotion and how the illustrator use texture and imagery to represent each emotion? The book also emphasizes being able to feel and honor whatever feeling comes up and tell us that it is OK to feel all of these feelings, it is okay to listen to our bodies, and it is okay to cry! So powerful, especially for young people who often get flooded and want to repress feelings. Let me know what else you are looking for and I might be able to brainstorm a solution to your problem! As a therapist I left the feeling words blank as to let client creativity lead the way (for older clients more feeling words and younger less) and not to have rigidity about what the feelings should be.

This sensitive book . . . encourages young ones to open up and discuss how they feel, even when their thoughts are confusing." — Parents Put your little one’s memory skills to the test with this sweet monster card match-up! Shuffle the cards so that the pairs of emotions are separated. Allow learners to study the card placement before you flip them upside down and then challenge them to find the matching pairs. Introduce the colors and feelingsin the story. Talk about different feelings you may have in different situation. For example, ask "Have you ever felt sad? Tell me about it". Then introduce this story about a monster whose feelings are all mixed-up! "He doesn't know how he feels. Let's find out more about Color Monster's feelings." It is a fabulous book for initiating social emotional learning activities with children in the early grades and the basis for this fun social emotional learning activity. The Color Monster Emotions Activity: Free Printable Prepare the activity Add googley eyes to any art projectsto make fun monsters. Here is an example of a great googley eye monster: Coffee filter monstersEn bilderbok perfekt för den som vill prata om färger och känslor, i ett! Jag älskar bilderna i boken. De olika komponenterna är utklippta i olika material och färger, som ett stort kreativt pysselprojekt. Det skapar en häftig dimension. It’s important to remind young learners that, at times, we may feel more than 1 emotion, or may not even be able to verbalize how we’re feeling at all! This hands-on activity enforces this notion visually by having learners attach colorful felt squares to a Color Monster cut-out.