The color monster

ABOUT THE BOOK
FAMILY ACTIVITIES

Written and illustrated by: Anna Lins | Translation: Malak Faruja/ Translation: Malak Farooge / Publisher: Kinneret

The Color Monster wakes up feeling a mixture of emotions: joy, sadness, anger and boredom. So, the little girl helps him understand his feelings by associating them with colors from nature.

Family Activities

The color monster had a mixture of feelings, so the child helps her in understanding these different feelings, and in naming and arranging them. This book presents a wonderful mediation to deal with feelings, as it introduces us to many, diverse and sometimes overlapping feelings that we may ...

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The color monster had a mixture of feelings, so the child helps her in understanding these different feelings, and in naming and arranging them.

This book presents a wonderful mediation to deal with feelings, as it introduces us to many, diverse and sometimes overlapping feelings that we may feel in our lives; the book explains them to us, embodies them using colors, and translates how these feelings are reflected in lived situations.

When we have mixed and overlapping emotions, we feel confused because these feelings may not be clear to us, and we cannot always distinguish and understand them. Our children need our support in recognizing, understanding, and arranging their feelings, as in our story, where the child supports the monster in identifying and understanding her feelings, naming them, and arranging them into “glass jars” which finally makes the monster feel her inner calm.

Family Activities

Let’s talk
• About feeling confused: With our child, we can discuss the mixed feelings of the monster. We can ask them: Why do you think the color monster woke up confused and excited? Have you ever felt this way?

• About colors and feelings: The color monster chose a color that embodies her feelings every time. We can have a conversation with our child about colors and feelings and we can ask them: Which colors represent your feeling of joy? anger? Sorrow? What do you do when you feel this emotion?

• About the connection between feelings and behaviour: With our child, we can have a dialogue and ask them: What changes in your body when you feel happy? angry? nervous? frightened? What do you do when you feel these emotions?

• About the feeling of love: We can look at the drawings on the last page and search for an embodiment of the meaning of love. We can talk to our child and ask them: How do we feel that we are loved?
Let’s enrich our language
• The book is rich in emotional vocabulary, which we may not use in the context of our spoken language. This generally limits our ability to express our feelings and even our awareness of them. We can include the use of emotional vocabulary in our daily lives to enrich our child's ability to be aware and express feelings.
Let’s create
• We can prepare a jar of feelings with our children, and we can include it as a ritual in our daily schedule, so that every day we can choose colorful cards that embody our feelings during the day: I felt happy when… I felt angry when… I felt nervous when… Then we can discuss those feelings together.

• The drawings in this book adopt the technique of collage. By using scraps of paper and newspaper, we can prepare various faces and paintings with our children. These could be funny, happy, sad, or angry.
Let’s communicate
• With our child, we can choose a daily “meditation” ritual that helps us relax, be aware and listen to our feelings, and relieve stress when we are angry or afraid.