15th October Grouch Day

Just stand up and complain said Grouch from Sesame Street over fifteen years ago and I first wrote about this day in 2013 giving lots of suggestions for a book display in your library. We often have a display of 'grumpy' books and they are always popular. The word 'grumpy' though has taken on new meaning since the arrival of the  Grumpy Monkey series by Suzanne Lang and her husband, Max Lang. While I was in England and then again in America I saw a large plush version of Grumpy and yet another new book. 'Grumpy' is such a good word and the students love saying it. Of course it has synonyms such as 'crabby', 'bad-tempered', 'prickly', 'crotchety', 'grouchy', 'snarky', 'stroppy', and 'cranky', but 'grumpy' is the one children like.

There are so many books to explore just using these synonyms in a  title search. If you look at this Pinterest list you will see what I mean. Here's some from our library to start you off:

10th October World Mental Health Day

Make mental health & well-being for all a global priority. 

Every year in October, around the time of World Mental Health day on the 10th, people all over the world celebrate Mental Health Week. Mental Health Awareness Week is held annually in the second week of October. This year, Mental Health Awareness Week 2022 will be held from 10th-16th October.

We know that lockdowns have had an effect on the mental wellbeing of children. In December 2020, research showed that more than four in ten parents had seen their children display behaviours that suggested heightened anxiety since the outbreak of Covid-19.

Almost half of the 1,000 parents of four- to twelve-year-olds who took part in the survey in Britain said they felt that the pandemic had also “negatively impacted” on their children’s friendships.

This has given rise to issues such as stress, fear, anxiety, depression, adjustment issues, apprehensions towards the future, surfacing of the previous and past undiagnosed and untreated mental health disorders, fear, phobia, and obsessions of contamination, fear of physical interactions, fear of uncertainty leading to helplessness. 

Schools can provide supportive platforms for children to share and talk about their feelings and fears to mental health professionals. They can render massive help by emphasising the importance of speaking out when disturbed or confused. This will help prevent and manage a lot of mental health issues that children could be facing. I work at a school that takes the wellbeing of the students very seriously. Class time is allocated regularly for Circle Time, Wellbeing sessions and wellbeing is always a focus at assemblies. 

What is good mental health? 

It is when we can cope with the stressors of our daily lives, participate in loving relationships, contribute to our community, and work towards our goals. So everyone has mental health, even children.

How many children have mental illness?

In 2013–14, an estimated 314,000 children aged 4–11 (almost 14%) experienced a mental disorder in the 12 months before the survey (Lawrence et al. 2015). Boys were more commonly affected than girls (17% compared with 11%).

ADHD was the most common disorder for children (8.2%), and the most common among boys (11%).

Anxiety disorders were the second most common disorders among all children (6.9%), and the most common among girls (6.1%).

More recent data, that factors in the pandemic, will probably show higher figures.

Teachers at my school frequently ask for books to support their Social and Emotional Programs, so there are shelves in the nonfiction section that now have many more books than they did in the past. There are books about feelings and emotions, books about neurodiversity,  mindfulness, tolerance, resilience, growth mindset and general wellbeing.

   

Start with What's in Your Mind Today? by Louise Bladen 

Then, the  most borrowed books about feelings are:

• In My Heart: A Book of Feelings  by Jo Witek and Christine Roussey

• The Colour Monster by Anna Llenas

• Feelings by Libby Walden and Richard Jones

• The Boy With Big Big Feelings by Britney Winn Lee and Jacob Souva

• Visiting Feelings by Lauren Rubenstein and Shelly Hehenberger

• How Are You Feeling Today? by Molly Potter and Sarah Jennings

• Big Feelings by Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kaufmann

About worries and anxiety:

• Ruby's Worry by Tom Percival 

• The Worrying Worries  by Rachel Rooney and Zahra Hicks

• Jeremy Worried About the Wind  by Pamela Butchart and Kate Hindley

• Jack's Worry by Sam Zuppardi

• What's Worrying You? by Molly Potter and Sarah Jennings

• Brave Every Day  by Trudy Ludwig and Patrice Barton

• When You Are Brave by Pat Zietlow Miller and Eliza Wheeler

Other general titles:

• What's Going on in my Head? by Molly Potter and Sarah Jennings

• The Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig and Patrice Barton

• Tomorrow I'll Be Brave  by Jessica Hische

• Brave by Stacey McAnulty and Joanne Lew-Vriethoff

• When Sadness Comes to Call by Eva Eland

• Mr Huff  by Anna Walker

• A World of Pausibilities  by Frank J. Sileo and Jennifer Zivoin

Of course there are many more books than this.

See here for more books on worries and anxiety.

See here for books on mindfulness.

10th October World Mental Health Day

This week is Mental Health Week. Yesterday was World Mental Health Day and mental health is certainly something that teachers need to be more aware of than we were in the past. Every class has children who struggle with anxiety, who worry excessively, who have anger issues and who appear especially despondent or unengaged, but the good thing is that because teachers now worry about emotional intelligence as well as academic and social intelligences, they plan for the teaching of it and have much better protocols for identifying and remedying these concerns.

Teachers program for and conduct Circle Time in their classrooms. They encourage students to talk about their feelings, to express their feelings through play, drama and art. They read and discuss wonderful stories that highlight feelings and strategies for overcoming feelings.

In the last couple of years four books have been published about feelings which allow for children to understand that everyone feels a gambit of emotions and that this is normal. These are:




















* Feelings: Inside My Heart and in My Head...
 by Libby Walden and Richard Jones.
* In My Heart A Book of Feelings  by Jo Witek
* The Great Big Book of Feelings by Mary Hoffman and Ros Asquith
* A Book of Feelings by Amanda McCardie and Salvatore Rubbino


While these are certainly not the only books that may be useful, these do cover more than one feeling in one book. There is a myriad of purpose written series about emotions with one emotion per book.

With the young children I teach I like to look at the expressions a fish can have in Mies Van Hout's illustrations in her book Happy and then discuss the emotion illustrated by connecting it back to themselves and when they have felt this way.


Another approach is to read a picture book where a character is having a particularly sad time and look at what happens to the character before discussing this situation. Two recent books that do this are:
* Mr Huff by Anna Walker,    and
* Willy and the Cloud by Anthony Browne.


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4th October Jo Witek (4/9/68)

It isn't Jo Witek's birthday today, but I have just learned that it was her birthday a month ago and she isn't already on my birthday list, so I am adding her now. Also I have just bought her new book ready to use in the library with my preschoolers this coming term. It is called Brave As Can Be.

Jo Witek is an author, journalist and screenwriter who lives in France. Her three picture books available in English are illustrated by Christine Roussey, a French illustrator who also lives in Paris. The three stories, Hello in There; In My Heart  and Brave as Can Be feature the same small girl.

In each book she 'tackles' big issues for preschoolers, getting a new sibling, feelings and being brave. The sibling title doesn't work as well with a large audience, but is better one on one with a child who is awaiting the birth of a sibling. The feelings title is very popular in my library. It includes multilayered die-cut pages featuring decreasing rainbow coloured hearts, big white expanses, and a cute girl who explores her emotions stated as similes... "My heart is like a house, with all these feelings living inside." My heart "is as heavy as an elephant", "like a plant reaching toward the sky".  It has wonderful vocabulary for empowering young children when talking about emotions.


Jo's new book on bravery empowers young children to confront  scary situations head on, but in a playful manner. No doubt there will be more winning titles to come!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year ... no birthday just food for thought. As always I am looking for ways to use literature with children to increase their empathy and I need to get at the boys young before they stop reading any fiction because I believe that it is reading fiction that develops empathic readers. Therefore I really savoured Elizabeth Farrelly's article in the Sydney Morning Herald and began to think about what I could do differently this year in classes to make a bigger impact. There goes my thinking time for the next three weeks!

I thought I'd share two books though today that will make you smile and which offer a myriad of avenues for getting very young children to look closely at feelings, theirs and others'. Both are by European authors and illustrators but available in English. Both appear simple because of their minimal text but they are deceptive and thus somewhat ageless.

Happy  by Mies Van Hout. Have you ever seen so much expression on a fish? This Dutch author's website is available in English and she has ideas for what to do with her book. One of the teachers at my school has used it very successfully for art  and in circle time. My staff had great fun sharing and comparing the French and English version of this book and deciding whether the translation was precise. We now need the original Dutch version and a Dutch speaker to translate so we can discuss it some more.

 In My Heart: A Book of Feelings by Jo Witek and Christine Roussey.   This cover illustration doesn't do this book justice. It has beautiful die-cut pages which show the heart decreasing in size. I haven't seen the original French version of this book.



Happy birthday Olivier Dunrea. His series about Gossie  is ideal for preschoolers and talking about feelings too.