Community Building Week 2: Feelings

Our second week, we talked about feelings. We made a list (complete with pictures) of different feeling words in English and Spanish, and we practiced making feeling faces: happy, sad, mad, scared. We talked about how we can tell how someone else is feeling (eyes up, eyes down, "mouth up", "mouth down", etc.).

Three of my favorite feeling/friendship books:

The Rainbow Fish/El pez arco iris
I haven't bought this one in Spanish yet, but I plan to. It's a great story about this fish who is beautiful with all these shiny scales, but is so arrogant (not that your kids will pick up on that, but you know...) that he's too busy being shiny to have friends. One day a little fish asks him to share one of his shiny scales, and he yells at the little fish to go away. After that, they all shun him (ouch...), and he's lonely (that, your kids will understand). Naturally, he discovers that sharing --> friends --> happiness.

The Scariest Monster in the World
Love, love, love! This book is really cute. The scariest monster in the world runs around scaring the other animals like it's his job (maybe it is?). Everything's fine until one day he gets the hiccups, and can't get rid of them. When the other animals see him crying in frustration, they decide to help him.Turns out that having friends is more fun than being scary.

Yes, We Can!
This is a great one for introducing bullying, and the fact that our actions have an affect on both our own feelings and those of others. In this story a mouse, a duck and a kangaroo start out playing together, and end up making fun of each other. Mama kangaroo comes in and teaches them to encourage instead of tease. Very cute, and a really good jump-off point for discussing how our words and actions affect other people's feelings.