The Color Monster: A Story About Emotions

Author/Illustrator: Anna Llenas
Key Skills: Emotions, Identifying Emotions, Self-Awareness

This is a wonderfully beautiful book that helps kids name their emotions. There are 6 color monsters: yellow is happiness, blue is sadness, red is angry, fear is gray, calm is green, and love is pink. The story walks you through these different color monsters and the emotions they focus on. The illustrations support the emotional imagery being shared in the text of the story. This book supports the development of Self-Awareness, which is a valuable Social-Emotional focus area (or competency).

This book is a great way to introduce and help students identify how these emotions look, sound, and feel (which is a good starting point, particularly with our younger students). Before I learned that my new school uses the Zones of Regulation school-wide, I was going to use the color monsters to create our emotion word wall. Students can use these emotions to practice naming their own emotions, which is the foundational step if you are looking for students to identify stress management strategies and learn to self-regulate.

This is a TERRIFIC book to use in elementary schools, especially with our younger learners. You can have discussions as a class about how each of these emotions feel inside their bodies as they experience them. You can ask that students begin sharing their emotions with sentence starters like, “I feel…”

“I feel yellow because I played with my friend.”

“I feel angry because I didn’t get the tool I wanted.”

“I feel green after taking some deep breaths.”

This language is valuable for students who are beginning to develop their own self-awareness as well as advocating for their needs. If a student isn’t in a space where they can focus on learning, their emotions are a signal of that, so getting students to honestly share their emotions is a way to know if there is a need to address so they can access the learning.

If you’re interested in purchasing this book, CLICK HERE to get a cheaper option than Amazon through AbeBooks (I’m not an affiliate, but I think you should have access to cheaper book options for your classroom.)