The Feelings Artbook

Promoting Emotional Literacy Through Drawing

Ruby Radburn

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429509070
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Education General

This fun, imaginative book offers children a way to develop their emotional literacy skills through creativity and drawing. The new edition has been reimagined as a child-friendly activity book that can be completed independently, with beautiful new illustrations and more than ten extra activities.

For professionals, the book is designed to be flexible and photocopiable, so that it can be used in a range of educational and therapeutic settings. The accompanying instructions and guidance are now available online, with a clearly stated aim for each activity, a suggested outline of how to facilitate and three optional follow-on ideas. There are now also three Monitoring and Evaluation templates included in the online booklet, one for individual work, one for group work and one for whole-class work.

The resource is divided into three themed sections:

• Self Esteem: Activities exploring identity, personal empowerment, aspirations and values, and important relationships in a child's life

• Emotions: In this section, children are invited to consider a range of complex feelings such as excitement, jealousy and disappointment

• Empathy and Imagination: These activities guide children towards an awareness of other people's experiences, emotions and feelings

Suitable for both parents and professionals, this book is an invaluable resource for anybody looking to improve the emotional awareness and wellbeing of young people.

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to the Second Edition of The Feelings Artbook with a new format, wonderful new illustrations and many new activities!

The First Edition of The Feelings Artbook was published in 2008, inspired by resources I created whilst working as a Primary School Learning Mentor. In this role, I worked with many children who had low self-esteem and difficulty in expressing their emotions appropriately, creating significant barriers to their learning and social interaction. Although many resources for working on emotional intelligence included illustrations, the active part of learning required children to write. For many of the children I worked with, this presented a challenge which detracted from the main aim of the activity, and in some cases further lowered self-esteem before we had even started. So I began to create my own resources where the children could explore their feelings through fun drawing activities, using my own simple illustrations as prompts or starting points.

Over ten years later, and the success of the book has meant I’ve had a wealth of opportunity to use the book with children and see how they respond. I’ve received feedback from other professionals who work with children on their emotional intelligence, and I’ve had time to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the First Edition. I have also had many more years of experience, developing my skills as an educator and my understanding of what engages and inspires the young people I work with.

The book was originally designed as a photocopiable resource of individual activities that could stand alone or be incorporated into an emotional literacy syllabus, for use in schools and other educational or therapeutic settings. Flexibility was always central to the design of the book. With the Second Edition, I wanted it to be even more flexible, and to m...