The Colour Monster

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He soon meets a young girl and together they embark on a journey, exploring all the different types of emotions.

Think of some questions that you would like to ask the Colour Monster about his first day at school. Use Scratch (or a similar coding platform) to program a monster that changes colour when you press different keys (or when another action takes place). The children might like to experiment with paint or water and food dye by mixing colours to see what new colours they can make. I liked this story because it shows the different emotions someone can feel and how to sort them to not bundle them all up together.

Anna Llenas es licenciada en Publicidad y Relaciones Públicas por la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona y graduada en Diseño Gráfico por la Escuela Llotja.

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. Vi följer alltså färgmonstret som råkat trassla ihop alla känslor i varandra och hen måste reda ut dom. It might help to have a friend, older brother or sister or a trusted adult help the child to sort out their feelings at those times, just like the Colour Monster and the little girl. For a lot of the littles (and teens too) that we work with there can be a lot of judgement that comes with anger and a portion of the therapeutic work can go towards decreasing shame about this real, normal, human emotion. The book identifies five feelings of happy, sad, angry, fearful, and calm, but I wanted to make sure if other feelings came up there would be space for them so I included eight.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. So (see above) the document is housed on my Google Drive as a PDF and then can be downloaded in PDF form. I love exploring this book with children and I can’t wait to share it with more children in the future. As an extension activity, the discussion could also focus on what things help when they are feeling sad, afraid or angry.

It is a truly fabulous way of encouraging children to acknowledge their emotions, alongside explaining feelings they may or may not have already experienced. Are some feelings darker (like pressed down harder when drawing) and what feeling are more prevalent?

The children must help the monster fill his jars by drawing people, things, or places that make them feel each of the feelings identified. Does their emotional literacy increase where they could initially name three feelings, but now it’s five? I have tried this on multiple computers so I am thinking the way that it downloaded for you is an individual computer issue (ie both of the worksheets should not be on the same page and are not when I access my copy). Indeed, on the final page the story doesn't explicitly spell out how the monster feels so children can have fun guessing and questioning what it 'feels' like to be in love! I would then ask the students to pick the color of the emotion they feel today and create an artwork with that color.