Perfect Picture Book Friday – In My Heart: A Book Of Feelings

Happy Perfect Picture Book Friday, Everyone!

With Valentines Day on the horizon (and the Valentiny Contest fast approaching!) I thought today was a good day for this lovely book about feelings!

Title: In My Heart: A Book Of Feelings

Written By: Jo Witek

Illustrated By: Christine Roussey

Publisher: Abrams Appleseed, October 2014, informational fiction

Suitable For Ages: 2-4 (but I think up to 6 would like!)

Themes/Topics: emotions

Opening: “My heart is full of feelings. Big feelings and small feelings. Loud feelings and quiet feelings. Quick feelings and slow feelings. My heart is like a house, with all these feelings living inside.

Brief Synopsis: Happiness, sadness, bravery, anger, shyness . . . hearts can feel so many things! Some make us feel as light as a balloon, others as heavy as an elephant. How does your heart feel?

text copyright Jo Witek 2014, illustration copyright Christine Roussey 2014, Abrams Appleseed

Links To Resources: make a collage of different colored hearts to represent your emotions/how you feel; draw a picture of what happy, sad, angry, brave, hopeful, shy, or any other emotion looks like to you; write a haiku or poem about being happy, sad, angry, brave, hopeful, shy, or any other emotion; make heart cookies (recipe HERE) and color the icing so you have a rainbow of emotions!

text copyright Jo Witek 2014, illustration copyright Christine Roussey 2014, Abrams Appleseed

Why I Like This Book: Emotions can be tricky even for adults. For kids, who have less experience of the world and a harder time understanding and articulating emotion, it’s wonderful to have a book like this that describes and shows the feel and the look of different basic emotions. The words are lovely, describing how different emotions feel in lyrical and accessible language (e.g. “Sometimes my heart feels as heavy as an elephant. There’s a dark cloud over my head, and tears fall like rain. This is when my heart is sad.“) And the art enhances the words by showing even further what the emotion looks like. The book is beautifully done, with heart cut-outs that run through the center of the book growing smaller on each page, and I think would be an asset to any library! 😊

text copyright Jo Witek 2014, illustration copyright Christine Roussey 2014, Abrams Appleseed

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do 😊

For the complete list of books with resources, please visit Perfect Picture Books.

PPBF folks, please add your titles and post-specific blog links (and any other info you feel like filling out 😊) to the form below so we can all come see what fabulous picture books you’ve chosen to share this week!

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone! 😊