Feelings

Books Help

There is a wide range of high-quality children’s books that incorporate colour, text and image, providing a powerful way for young children and adults to learn about emotion. Storybooks and video resources can help children to build a feeling vocabulary for talking about their emotions and illustrate the different ways people handle and express their feelings. It is important that children understand that there is a wide range of emotions and that it is healthy to feel these. When parents help children label their emotions they can help them identify with the emotions of other children. You can move between viewing the video and using the Story Book, ‘Sarah’s Story’, which accompanies this series, for this purpose.

When a child and parent read a book or watch a video together, any scene can be freeze framed or revisited again and again to discuss what is happening. The parent/teacher can use open-ended questions to encourage the child to think about the underlying message and the moral of the narrative. This sharing creates a bond between parent and child and everyone can feel a greater sense of involvement with the characters in the story.