This miniature book about feelings for kids is called “My Book About Feelings” and comes to us from Scholastic.com. That’s right, the people known for school book fairs and those book order forms that your kids bring home all the time also offers a series of mini printable books for kids.
This particular book gives young children (officially aged 3-5, but potentially slightly older kids too) an opportunity to write about their feelings. At only 8 half-pages long, this rhyming book asks kids to write out what makes them happy, sad, scared, mad and glad. In addition, it asks children to record the best feeling they’ve ever had and one additional emotion of their choice.
This resource can be potentially very valuable for younger children experiencing intense emotions. While it lacks a certain depth, any exercise which helps kids to identify their own emotions can have a healing (and often long-lasting) effect, and we would recommend this resource for younger children.
For a more extensive treatment of emotions and helping kids to recognize and deal with them, as well as a resource for older children, please see the resources we developed titled My Feelings Workbook and Draw Your Emotions.
My mother died days after I turned six years old. For six years, my father raised myself and my three brothers by himself to fulfill a promise he had made to my mother. When I was twelve, my father remarried and we plunged head first into the world of step families. At the time, it all seemed so very normal to me at the same time all the while knowing that my family was different. There were some struggles and some hard times, but that’s family. That’s my story. We all have a story, and for those of us who did not grow up in “traditional families” often have stories marked by loss, pain and longing for something we felt like we should have had. It’s not always all bad though. Sometimes our stories are also marked by perseverance and overcoming. We want to hear your stories. More importantly, we want other people to hear your stories.
When a marriage breaks up and a divorce occurs children have to adjust to a lot of changes. Sometimes it means moving to another place to live or living in two homes. It also means many children have to give up a pet.
One of the best ways to help kids deal with difficult emotions when they come up is to prepare them for that time by building their emotional intelligence ahead of time. Grimace is an app designed for just that purpose. Grimace is the brain child of Oliver Spindler and Thomas Fadrus who set out to “find a non-verbal representation of emotions that can be integrated into interactive systems.” From a school research project to they developed an app that allows the users to visually see and put a face to various combinations of six basic emotions:
Welcome back to our series of “Sunday Morning Strategies” for accommodating children of divorce, children from single parent homes and children from other modern family types in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. In today’s installment, we’re going to talk about the absolute necessity of training your volunteers so they will be prepared to deal with these kids.
If you’ve thought about suicide, or lost a loved one to suicide, you need to know that you’re not alone! If you currently feel hopeless, I urge you to call the suicide hotline at 1-800-273-8255, or you can send an anonymous email to 
Welcome back to our brand new series called “Sunday Morning Strategies” where we are examining things you can do in your Sunday morning children’s ministry programs to accommodate children of divorce and children from various types of modern families. There are certain things you can incorporate into your ministry to specifically address the issues and concerns of these children in your churches, and we will get to those later in this series. However, we’re going to start with some of the fundamentals underlying your ministry. Today, we are going to talk about forms and how some simple adaptations can help you to learn about the kids in your ministry who aren’t living in what we might call “traditional homes.”
