The Color Monster
Sterling Children’s Books
By Anna Llenas
20 pages
age 3-5, 5-8
Synopsis from Sterling Children’s Books:
We teach toddlers to identify colors, numbers, shapes, and letters—but what about their feelings? By illustrating such common emotions as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and calm, this sensitive book gently encourages young children to open up with parents, teachers, and daycare providers. And kids will LOVE the bright illustrations and amazing 3-D pop-ups on every page!
Feelings can be complex for kids to decipher and understand. In The Color Monster, a young girl helps her Monster friend understand his colourful feelings, distinguishing between each one. Along with labeling actions associated with feelings, like laughing for happiness and feeling small for fear, each feeling is associated with a colour.
The illustrations transition from cutout images, providing depth to what you’re looking at, to visuals that pop out of the page. The pop-ups combine colour and environment, transporting Monster and the reader into that emotion. The small black monster stands amidst twisting branches popping off the page in an arch. With the little girls help, Monster separates his emotions into bottles which the reader can reveal.
The Color Monster creates an association of actions, colours and feelings and labels them against common emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, calm and love. It opens an opportunity to talk about how children feel, giving them a way to express themselves and determine what they might be feeling. The images and pop-ups are fascinating to look at and do a great job recreating the emotions they’re depicting.
Please leave a comment below letting me know any books your kids are interested in so I can keep them in mind for future reviews.
Additional Reading: Mix It Up.
You can find a copy of The Color Monster from Sterling Children’s Books or your local bookstore. Visit our Kid’s Books section for other great book recommendations.
Hello!
I’m new to your blog (and to blogging), but not at all new to children’s literature. 🙂 My four-year-old son received a copy of The Color Monster for Christmas this year. We have really enjoyed it… A social worker who spoke at my school not long ago shared an interesting aside about “feeling words”. According to her, the average child only uses approximately 4-5 feeling words. Of course, when I heard that, I immediately began naming every feeling my children could possibly be feeling. I love that this book furthers that conversation in our house.
I have recently posted about a new favorite author, Ed Vere and his book, Banana! if you would like to check it out.
https://biblioparenting.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/introduce-your-preschooler-to-punctuation/
~Katie~
Thanks for your comment Katie and sharing the insight you received from the social worker. Thanks for the other book suggestion. I’ll have to checkout your link.