Woot woot, let’s get this challenge started! Here’s the activity for Week 1 of the Summer Reading Challenge: INSIDE OUT. Inside Out 2 came out a few weeks ago and while I haven’t seen it yet, Inside Out is one of my favorite animated movies of all time so it felt perfectly appropriate to adapt a reading challenge to fit these beautiful films. Okay, here we go!
Note: You don’t need to have watched Inside Out or Inside Out 2… we’re just going to adapt the theme of those movies for this reading challenge.
Grab a picture book and track a secondary character’s emotional journey throughout the story.
What you’ll need:
A picture book with a few characters that appear frequently throughout the book
A reading buddy
Purpose:
Identifying emotions by interpreting facial expressions and body language
Building awareness of self and others
Ask kids:
Can you describe their facial expressions? Why do you think they feel that way?
Why do you think [describe character’s body language]?
What emotion do you think they’re feeling? (If kids are older ask them to distinguish between feelings; e.g. what’s the difference between upset and frustrated?)
Adapting by age:
For very young kids, you’ll probably be the one tracking the character on their behalf and talking through the emotions you see a character experiences
For older kids, ask them to articulate the nuance in emotions (i.e. don’t just list one emotion, list a few and what the differences are between them and why they’re appropriate for that character in that specific scene)
Please come back and share how this reading activity worked (or didn’t) for you! Did you / your kids love it? Hate it? What book did you choose? Would love to hear how it went!
Right out of the psychologist playbook :) This is a great prompt because it can be illuminating as to what/how our kids are interpreting the emotional story. Did this last night with the youngest and it was fascinating to hear her interpretations of the scenes in the book.
Yes, it's always startling to hear something you weren't expecting or even thought of. Any interesting interpretations you'd want to share (no pressure!)?
Well we were looking at scene about someone being scared and I asked her why that person might be scared. She reported because it was dark even though that was not the actual scary thing. She is currently coping with being scared of the dark herself, so that was a good reason for her to be scared.
We just tried this -- no prompting from me needed. We read Mr. Tiger Goes Wild and my kiddo pointed out on his own that the tiger was sad in his clothes and happier in the forest
Right out of the psychologist playbook :) This is a great prompt because it can be illuminating as to what/how our kids are interpreting the emotional story. Did this last night with the youngest and it was fascinating to hear her interpretations of the scenes in the book.
Yes, it's always startling to hear something you weren't expecting or even thought of. Any interesting interpretations you'd want to share (no pressure!)?
Well we were looking at scene about someone being scared and I asked her why that person might be scared. She reported because it was dark even though that was not the actual scary thing. She is currently coping with being scared of the dark herself, so that was a good reason for her to be scared.
Tried this out last night with The Babysitters Club graphic novel Mary Anne's Bad Luck Mystery. Lots of synonyms for scared came up!
Sounds appropriate given the title! How did they like the book overall? I hope no one was too freaked out.
We just tried this -- no prompting from me needed. We read Mr. Tiger Goes Wild and my kiddo pointed out on his own that the tiger was sad in his clothes and happier in the forest
Yay! That’s wonderful! Thanks so much for sharing.
Oh this is so awesome - a great way to build emotional intelligence