The Colour Monster    

At Gooseberry Green we use The Colour Monster. You may have seen the book during our book week which was one of the books we focused on. Your child’s emotional wellbeing is paramount to us at Gooseberry Green and we would like to introduce to them a way of recognising and becoming aware of their emotions.

This simple but effective book is designed to help children understand and talk about their emotions.

At the start we are introduced to a character called The Colour Monster who has just woken up feeling very confused. Their body is a mass of different coloured squiggly lines which represent his emotions. Their friend explains to them that they feel all mixed up because their colours are all mixed up. They take his hand and offer to help.

To sort out their colours they suggests popping each one into a jar. As the little jar fills up we learn that yellow is happiness, blue is sadness, red is anger, black is fear and green is calm. They explain how each one feels inside you and the illustrations do a wonderful job of evoking the associated facial expressions.

Once the jars are full the monster feels much better and they start to turn pink – the colour of love.

Equating emotions with colour is a great way of introducing this topic to a small child. Most won’t have the vocabulary to explain how anger feels to them, for example, but will be able to show you that they feel ‘red’ or ‘yellow’ after reading the book.

It also reinforces the fact that big emotions are normal, everyone has them and that sharing how you feel will ultimately help to feel better. We incorporate fun activities to do with The Colour Monster within our sessions.