The Colour Monster

The Colour Monster is a wonderful way into exploring emotions for children as colour is used to represent different feelings through the little Colour Monster. When the monster wakes up feeling confused - and the colours swirl on his chest - a little girl helps him. She explains his colours are mixed up 'because your feelings are all stirred together, so your colours are too'. She helps him by putting each 'feeling' into a different jar. Yellow, for example, is happiness, "It shines yellow like the sun and twinkles like the stars', while blue is sadness: 'It's gentle like a blue rainy day'. The collage imagery brings the pictures off the page - although if you want to see this to best effect, seek out the original hardback of The Colour Monster which was produced as a pop up book. Once all the colours are separated, the Colour Monster feels calm. This would be lovely to use with Early Years children to talk about how they feel and perhaps create 'colour jars' to demonstrate how they are feeling, and how many different emotions you can feel at any one time. I would also use it with older KS1 children to begin writing about feelings through colour, using some of the sentences in the book and similes to inspire their own writing - for example, for green: 'This is calm. It's quiet like the trees and soft like their leaves'. They could plan this out with their own drawings of little monsters, too. A very useful little story! Picture book / Ages 3+ / Reviewed by Alice Munster.

Suggested Reading Age 3+