The Color Monster: free downloadable worksheet set

Sometimes feelings get…all tangled up.  This can be confusing and sometimes we need help untangling them and sorting them all out.  Enter “The Color Monster” by Anna Llenas! This book is AMAZING and as I talk about here and here bibliotherapy is such a wonderful practice that is so adaptable to provide as a therapeutic approach in all sorts of settings – office, in home, at school, and of course Tele-Play!

This book is a wonderful story about a “Color Monster” who is full of mixed up colors and emotions.  A little girl takes the monster by the hand and gently helps the Color Monster untangle and separate out all of these feelings and put them into jars. 

The level of compassion in this book is SO wonderful.  One of my favorite things to tell young people is that feelings aren’t good or bad – they are just our bodies way of letting us know what is going on in the world around us!  For a lot of the littles (and teens too) that we work with there can be a lot of judgement that comes with anger and a portion of the therapeutic work can go towards decreasing shame about this real, normal, human emotion.  This makes sense as to why my most favorite line in the book is “Sometimes, you want to take out your anger on others.  But I’ll be nice to you, Color Monster, and your anger will disappear!”. My heart just melts on this page!

The book also emphasizes being able to feel and honor whatever feeling comes up and tell us that it is OK to feel all of these feelings, it is okay to listen to our bodies, and it is okay to cry! So powerful, especially for young people who often get flooded and want to repress feelings. 

Another thing that is just fantastic about this book is the use of metaphor.  It compares anger to a fire you might want to stomp out, sadness to a rainy day, and calm like leaves swaying in the wind.  If you are doing any sort of metaphor work with kids this is a GREAT book to get the wheels turning!
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When I am reading this with young people after I will pause, ask them what they noticed, and most of the time go into a Cognitive Behavioral Play Therapy activity about feeling identification and levels!  I have included a free download of these worksheets HERE!  I had so much fun creating these printables and thank goodness for all the Amazon packages I have been getting lately - there was no shortage of cardboard for this project!

So, after we read the book I have them select colors (up to eight - but let's be honest you could add more boxes and print a duplicate of the feelings jar page if you needed more) and color code and write in what feelings came up for them today or in the week using The Color Monster Check In download.  The book identifies five feelings of happy, sad, angry, fearful, and calm, but I wanted to make sure if other feelings came up there would be space for them so I included eight.

One thing to notice is how the feelings are being drawn.  As opposed to a color your heart activity (where the feelings are separate) the Color Monster’s feelings can be mixed up. Are some feelings darker (like pressed down harder when drawing) and what feeling are more prevalent? Do some feelings have just one line and are there obvious feelings that are missing? Do the feelings spill out of the color monster and onto the rest of the page?   These are all great things to notice and process along with how it feels in their bodies when the feelings are mixed up, any thoughts that might come up for the Color Monster, and the choices the monster may make when feeling all mixed up! Oh, it is also a fantastic externalizing technique! 

The next sheet is all about taking time to separate out and honor each feeling.  With the My Feeling Jar worksheet you can clearly identify each feeling experienced and how much of each feeling.  You can go deeper with young people and identify triggers, how they felt it in their bodies, warning signs of these feelings, and choices that might be helpful vs unhelpful to honor what is going on for them over the week. 

This exercise is also a great tracking technique.  If you engage in this activity with clients periodically how does their Color Monster change over time?  What about levels or ranges of feelings?  Does their emotional literacy increase where they could initially name three feelings, but now it’s five?    

Now, although this activity is for younger children, teens also have tangled up emotions too!  The teen version of this? This fantastic Tangled Ball of Emotions Download you can snag HERE from Sources of Strength. I have been using this drawing activity for a prompt of how teens feel currently and having them fill out a second for how they desire to feel.  From that point we can spring board off into processing how to get from here to there!
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Here’s hoping this activity brings you and your clients some superpowers to help untangle those messy, chaotic, and confusing feelings!  

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