"If your happy and you know it clap your hands, if your happy and you know it, than your face will really show it..." This book entitled, Glad Monster Sad Monster is a great way to teach a child the above lyrics and use the pictures inside this interactive hardcover book.

I picked it out because Nicholas has social skills deficits due to being on the Autism Spectrum, and I wanted to help him learn to express his feelings.

This has turned into one of his favorite non-animal books. Although the pictures are cartoon like animals, he prefers the life-like pictures of animals. Some of his quotes from looking through this book are:

Next is a really funny guy
He’s kind of different
He looks mad
He looks kinda scared
A scary ghost
He looks happy
Look Mom I’m a ghost
See the small spider web on the page
He’s a pink one

Glad Monster, Sad Monster is thirty pages long in dark black pages with bright happy and sad colorful faces with two holes for the eyes and the larger shape opening for the nose. In the front of the book is the diagram that explains the steps to use the flaps. A child who is not yet able to read will know how to follow these self-explanatory steps with cute pictures. First the book gets opened with the flap being lifted, read the text and try on the mask while pretending to have fun!

Inside Glad Monster, Sad Monster from the first page we have a yellow monster with birthday presents and the corresponding pictures showing what you do at a birthday party. The alligator picture has an arrow pointing to the page to lift to open the flap and see the mask to place the eyes and nose in. Can you guess what makes you glad?

The blue monster looks quite blue with a sad blue drummer feeling blue because it rained on his parade. The blue balloon shows the arrow where to find the sad monster face. These monster faces have the colors reflecting the feelings as well as the facial features reflecting the mood of the monster.

The pink monster starts off with valentine’s day and feels loved in all the pictures with a puppy at the arrow taking you to the loving monster mask. There are pink flowers, cookies and hearts on these pages.

An orange monster listens to the thunderstorms while searching under his bed wondering about creepy things. A scary spider points you to the page to see the orange monster with the green nose. Then the purple monster likes to make funny faces and feel silly doing sounds like Goink! A silly looking cat will point you towards the purple monster asking you to be silly with his face.

Next is a red monster that gets splashed and laughed at which makes him very angry. A bird chirping leads the way to the red angry face with mean looking teeth. The last monster is the green scary one who likes to Shoo! The birds around and be very scary. There is a green cactus that shows the arrow to get to the green scary monster mask.

To recap the colors and masks are as follows:

Yellow = glad
Blue = sad
Pink = loving
Orange = worried
Purple = silly
Red = angry
Green = scary

Glad Monster, Sad Monster is a fun and imaginative book that can be utilized alone by a child to experiment with the faces or masks depending on what they want to call them. You can involve more than one child and adult and use the colors to interact with other toys to pick which feeling they are.

The same can be done with clothing if you have your child get their clothes out the next day for school. You could ask them how they are feeling and what type of monster they want to be, especially since this is the month, October, for Halloween.

This is a good book for a home day care to purchase to help with children who have difficulty expressing their feelings. For a home schooling family this would be an addition for your library. For families who have children with disabilities this can be utilized to help develop a way to interact in other ways with colors and masks.

There are many opportunities to explore one’s feelings and see what makes the various colored monsters happy and/or sad. A whole week project could be used for a home care environment or home school with each day being another feeling color using toys and games chosen to match the color of the day. The kids take turns opening the flap and placing the monster masks on their faces. This will help them learn together and take turns.

The Glad Monster, Sad Monster book promotes asking questions as in are you happy, sad, glad and/or what makes you feel this way? Other kids can have fun pulling up the nose off the mask when it is on another child. You can also use this book to help children draw happy and sad faces to aid in their sharing of feelings to be used when they want to. I suggest adding this book to a holiday list to be enjoyed throughout the year.

Previously published on Epinions

Glad Monster, Sad Monster is available at Amazon.

Monsters, Inc. Buy From Art.com

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