Who I Am: Words I Tell Myself

Author: Susan Verde
Illustrator: Peter H. Reynolds
Key Skills: Self-Perception, Positive Self-Talk, Affirmations, Positivity, Self-Awareness

Before I jump in, I believe EVERY classroom should have ANY book created by these two wonderful souls! You’ll definitely see more of them on this page! Who I Am is a new book that came out just last year and I think Susan and Peter outdid themselves with this one! I am so obsessed with this book, I want to buy a copy for EACH of my students EVERY year.

Before I dive into this book, I want to share a tidbit of information. Researchers estimate that people think 50,000-70,000 thoughts a day and 80% of those thoughts are negative. Now, this is an estimation, but I have had conversations with kids and they’ve shared that the positive thoughts are harder to hear. And in my own personal life, that’s ABSOLUTELY TRUE! We need to help our kids (and ourselves) create more positive self-talk and practice drowning out the negative self-talk to hear that positive.

This book does exactly that! It even tells readers that there are those negative thoughts there! This book is filled with extremely relatable scenarios to the human experience of facing our thoughts every day. This book also shares simple, yet powerful affirmations we can repeat with our students.

This is all about building self-perception, which is the word for how we see ourselves. Through affirmations, we build up our positive self-talk and then, can grow an accurate and more positive perception of ourselves. These skills are all supportive of developing self-awareness.

The affirmations in this book can help deal with big emotions, challenges, failures, help build up our stress management and self-regulation. I plan to use this book consistently throughout the year, using the affirmations here to create our class mantra, and keep it in our Calm Corner.

If you’re interested in purchasing this book (which I highly recommend), buy it cheaper on AbeBooks and CLICK HERE to check it out!