Everybody Feels . . . Sad

Review also includes:

Everybody Feels… Angry, 978-1784934279

Children’s feelings are sometimes hard to understand.  Even children themselves may find it difficult to express what they feel, and this little series of four books (the other two are about feeling happy and feeling scared) may help in the understanding of and expressing of emotions.

In ‘Sad’ we meet two children who are experiencing sadness in very different ways.  Chloe has lost her toy elephant Beebee, and this has made her very unhappy.  She can’t tuck him under her pillow at night or take him to school as she usually does.  When friends find Beebee at school, Chloe is happy again.  Omar has a special cat called Socks, and when Socks dies, Omar is seriously unhappy.  His parents help him to remember Socks and help him to understand that Socks won’t be coming back.  But when they give him two new kittens, he learns that he can love them while still remembering and loving Socks.  So, two very different reasons for feeling sad, and both explained carefully and thoughtfully.  In ‘Angry’, Sophie gets very angry when her dog chews up her trainer, and her little brother draws on the picture she had been working on; Ethan gets angry when his brother eats the chocolate bar he has been given.  Both children suffer all the consequences of anger – clenched fists, feeling like a balloon about to burst or a kettle on the boil, and, finally, they shout out their anger.  As they live next door to each other, they cool off together in the garden and find they feel better.  After making friends again with their siblings, all is well.  ‘Angry Girl and Angry Boy had gone!’

In both books, after the children’s stories, we are given a résumé of each event intended for use in schools to help children understand how such events sequence.  This is part of notes for parents and teachers.  There are also two pages of ‘Story Words’, really a simplified glossary that uses pictures as well as words to explain meanings.  The wonderfully coloured and very accessible pictures add greatly to the whole.