The Color Monster: A Story about Emotions: 1

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At the start of the story, the Colour Monster is feeling confused. When have you felt confused? What did you do in this situation? What can we do when we feel confused in the future? Encouraging freedom of expression, especially at a young age, is very important. This activity encourages learners to use their imagination and tap into their own emotions. Guide learners on how to draw a funky monster by first giving a demonstration, and then handing out art supplies and letting them take the wheel as they create their own.

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. 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? Make a list of words that the author links with each colour, e.g. yellow = bright and light, blue = gentle and alone. Can you think of synonyms for these words?

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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. Remember to read The Colour Monster Goes to School and try our related ideas too! Teaching Ideas and Resources: English 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?

The next sheet is all about taking time to separate out and honor each feeling. With the My Feeling Jar worksheet you can clearly identify each feeling experienced and how much of each feeling. You can go deeper with young people and identify triggers, how they felt it in their bodies, warning signs of these feelings, and choices that might be helpful vs unhelpful to honor what is going on for them over the week. The little girl puts the Colour Monster’s feelings into separate jars. Use the template below to draw things that make you happy/ angry/sad etc.Play Simon Says with the Color Monster’s help and visually act out a series of emotions! For example, using the little pink monster displayed below, the teacher will call out, “The Color Monster is in love”, and students will give themselves or a friend a big hug! 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. Don’t worry though, this project is not as serious as it sounds. These fun and easy monster drawings do more than just create monster paintings. Taking time to validate our learners makes them feel seen, heard, and cared for. Label an assortment of jars using a series of emotional faces. Over the course of a week, have your learners drop items, or their names, into the jar that they feel best represents their feeling that day. At the end of the week help them tally up the items and analyze their predominant emotion. If you’re looking for a more advanced activity to pair with the reading of this wonderful book, then look no further! This activity requires students to listen to the story and then spend time completing this fill-in-the-blank worksheet; inferring the monster’s feelings from what they have heard.

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. 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." The Color Monster by Anna Llenas teaches abour big emotions in a simple way for young children. In the story, an adorable monster has mixed-up feelings and the author helps to sort them out. Happiness is like the sun, anger is a burning fire, and calm is like the leaves swaying in the wind. Young children may not be able to tell you exactly what they are feeling, but they can use the concepts in this book to help express themselves. Sometimes feelings get… all tangled up. This can be confusing and sometimes we need help untangling them and sorting them all out. Enter “ The Color Monster” by Anna Llenas! This book is AMAZING and as I talk about here and here bibliotherapy is such a wonderful practice that is so adaptable to provide as a therapeutic approach in all sorts of settings – office, in home, at school, and of course Tele-Play! The format of the book allows for a conversation with children about managing their feelings 'putting them into bottles' and discussing why they might be feeling a particular emotion.Have your students identify basic emotions as they match assorted colors and emotions to the correct monster. Once they’ve matched everything correctly, they can spend time coloring in their worksheet and, in small groups, discussing when they feel certain emotions. 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.

Think of other emotions and choose colours that might represent them (e.g. frustration, disgust, envy). Add googley eyes to any art projectsto make fun monsters. Here is an example of a great googley eye monster: Coffee filter monsters Children easily gain a better understanding of how artists use color to express emotion during this lesson. Use the book, The Color Monster, by Anna Llenas as inspiration for this easy monster craft for young children. The illustrations in this book help open up a whole discussion of feelings and emotions about different children’s experiences. Love the collage-y illustrations of this picture book, but the text has some troubling issues. While it is vital to teach children to identify their emotions, it is just as important to help them understand that it is normal to feel more than one single emotion at a time, even about the same thing/person/idea. furthermore, labeling emotions with specific colors doesn't work as a one-size-fits-all solution, since color is a very personal experience; people feel very differently about the same color. Telling children that blue is sadness will confuse children who experience blue as tranquility, or power, or curiosity, or any number of other emotions. This book goes so far as to tell children how to experience certain emotions:By using cardboard, yarn, felt, a marker, and glue, little learners can design and craft their very own Color Monsters! They can use these creatures to put on an at-home, or in-class, puppet show and better yet; use the color monsters to help them verbalize different emotions. Another thing that is just fantastic about this book is the use of metaphor. It compares anger to a fire you might want to stomp out, sadness to a rainy day, and calm like leaves swaying in the wind. If you are doing any sort of metaphor work with kids this is a GREAT book to get the wheels turning! Review story vocabulary. Here are some words in the story you may want to define: emotions, jumbled, separate, shines, twinkles, happiness, sadness, lonely, washes over, alone, burns, stamp out, unfair, disappear, fear, afraid, courage, shadows, calm, quiet, swaying, breathe, peace, different. (I would choose just a few.) 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 Here’s hoping this activity brings you and your clients some superpowers to help untangle those messy, chaotic, and confusing feelings!