feathersescapism:

kawuli:

litafficionado:

“If you give children a vocabulary that’s large enough and complex enough to express their emotions and their ideas, you give them access to complex feelings and emotions in themselves. So that if you talk to a teenager and all they can say about how they feel is BAD, and they haven’t got, you know, a larger vocabulary for lonely, abused, insecure, frightened…I mean there’s this huge panoply which…I remember when my daughter was just telling me that she just felt bad, I bought her a thesaurus. I said, “Look up, is it sort of over lonely, or is it insecure…and look up under lonely, you’ll find two hundred words for lonely. Which one?” But what that does is that it makes you feel that there’s this huge complexity of emotions and there are words for all of them. If you want children to feel less frustrated and less disenfranchised and less unable to even feel comfortable with their own emotions, you’ll have to give them a vocabulary that’s as complicated as their inner lives. And one of the things we see in children is this incredibly reduced capacity for reporting their inner lives to the exterior world. One of the things is just teaching them poems, just teaching them to memorize poems in school, they don’t have to interpret them, if they just internalize the language of the poem, the complexity of the emotion in the poems…”
–Jorie Graham, in a conversation

My therapist literally handed me a kids book full of feelings words and said “pick some of these” when I just went ???? when she asked how I felt.

One of my biggest frustrations and to me one of the most clear and absolute dividing lines between people in my program who understood that children’s librarianship includes needing to know about child development and the needs of children’s developing brains and how cognition is developed and how to support it, and those who were in that track because They Loved Children’s Literature … .was how often I had to end up defending the bog-standard non-”inspired” photograph based books that are just basically long collections of words or word-use examples with illustrating images. 

“Feelings” words books were and are high up on this list: people would gravitate towards those with ~*whimsical*~ and ~*artistic*~ imagery and I’m like no. Those are very pretty but for this purpose they are useless, and you should just get this pedestrian photograph-based one from Scholastic that was actually designed by some pretty fucking smart educators and kid-psychs so that the child does not have to decode YET ANOTHER RANGE of visually-encoded markers to translate that circle with another curved circle to mean “happy”. 

Or do the same thing with recognizable figures (like from popular TV or movies) and short, simplistic storylines. 

Like I love Great Children’s Lit and it also has its OWN importance and uses, and like I Miss My Hat and similar are all brill, but for the love of fucking god Olaf’s Friendship Book is also a hugely useful treasure and I will fight you.