Recognising the importance of helping children and young people (CYP) with their emotions is key to their development and wellbeing. By understanding and being in touch with their emotions, they can learn how to express themselves effectively and develop healthy coping mechanisms when faced with challenges, including domestic abuse.

Giving CYP the tools to identify and explore their emotions helps to build their social skills, confidence, self-regulation, empathy, and problem-solving. This will in turn enable them to navigate situations more effectively, build healthy relationships, and make better decisions.

One of our core values here at NIDAS is to be creative, which we aim to extend across all of our services. In particular, our children’s workers incorporate creative activities, arts, and stories into their sessions to make them fun, interactive, and engaging. One of our support worker’s favourite stories is ‘The Colour Monster’.

The Colour Monster

Written and illustrated by Anna Llenas, The Colour Monster is a beautiful story that helps young children identify, recognise, and explore their emotions. Narrated by a small girl who introduces her friend, the colour monster; the story is the colour monster, whose emotions – represented by colours – are mixed up, leaving him feeling very confused.

The girl helps the colour monster to sort out his emotions by showing him how to recognise and separate his feelings. She assigns each emotion to a colour and describes each feeling for him before offering to help him through the challenging ones. At the end of the story, the colour monster has sorted his emotions into jars, making room for a new colour to blossom.

How we use The Colour Monster at NIDAS

This book is a great starting point to open up a conversation about emotions and exploring how a child feels when they experience each one mentioned. Our CYP practitioners use this story as a guide to help children to explore their own feelings, working through how they look and feel.

The story is used in 1.1 sessions as a guide to support children’s mental health and wellbeing. It provides them with the tools to help them to begin to explore their feelings; how positive and negative feelings can impact our body and mind, within a safe and confidential environment.

This story is used by NIDAS CYP practitioners as a guide to help the children to explore their own emotions, and how they look and feel. We use different activities to discover the story, such as talking, drawing, or painting.

Feedback

A child who our Family Team Support Worker recently used the story with said, “I feel much better in myself now that I have sorted all my own feelings out.”

This is a delightful story for children of all ages. You can watch/listen to the story read aloud by Joshua Brooks on You Tube.

If you have a child who would benefit from our children, teen, or family services, please get in touch by calling us on 01623 683 250 or email [email protected]. If you are a professional looking to refer a child or young person, please contact us at [email protected].