How Do I Feel?

With 60+ definitions to help improve emotional literacy, this huge hardcover book with over 140 pages is all about our children learning to recognise and label emotions and feelings. Join Aroha and her friends as they share how different emotions might feel in the body and how each emotion might be helpful. This emotions dictionary is all about helping children find the words for how they truly feel.

Learning to recognise and label our emotions correctly is such an important skill for life. Giving our children this language helps to build emotional literacy. It is a gift to give children the tools to know how to recognise what they truly feel and that it is okay to feel all emotions. When they know that no emotion is 'good' or 'bad' and that all emotions provide messages, then it takes away any attachment to that emotion being part of who they are.

We may have experienced this ourselves being labelled 'naughty' or 'out of control' due to feeling angry a lot. However, this behaviour is just a way for a child to communicate. Diving deeper into why they are acting that way, why they may be feeling the things they are, can help us find some answers with our child. It can also help us find ways to help them empower themselves with tools to feel better.

Use How Do I Feel? to start conversations about different emotions. If you can, give examples of things you have experienced. When you see a child experiencing an emotion, help your child label it. "Are you feeling... right now?" This book can be used with children from 5 years of age up to 100+ as everyone might get something from it. There are over 200 emotions, and while we couldn't include them all in just one book, this book is the most extensive book about emotions for children.

Ages: 5 plus

Author: Bex Lipp was co-founder of the award-winning business Awesome Inc, which started around creating gratitude journals and was a great base to launch into publishing children's books. Bex also co-wrote the book Finding Gratitude through Quarto Publishing in the US. Bex's personal struggles with mental health issues led her to conceive the idea of making a picture book around the emotions associated with anxiety.

Illustrator: Craig Phillips has worked as a professional illustrator for the US and Australian publishing industries for twenty years. His client list includes Random House, Scholastic, Simon and Schuster, Hachette, Hardie Grant, Bloomsbury, Oxford University Press, and many more. His work has appeared in art anthologies such as The Society of Illustrators Annual, Spectrum Fantastic Art Annual, and Luerzers 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide, and has been exhibited at the Museum of American Illustration. Phillips also worked on Neil Gaiman's American Gods in 2017. His first solo work, titled Giants, Trolls, Witches, Beasts: Ten Tales from the Deep, Dark Woods (Allen and Unwin, 2017) won the NZ Book Award's Russell Clark Award for Illustration, a Gold Ledger in the Australian Ledger Awards, a Notable Book in the CBCA Awards, and was a finalist in the Aurealis Awards.