teach your child how to be kind with the moodsters mirror :: giveaway

I’ve featured The Moodsters products twice before here and here.  Child development and parenting expert, Denise Daniels, created The Moodsters to help children understand and regulate their own emotions. After working with children in many capacities, Daniels started The National Childhood Grief Institute. While working with children experiencing grief, she realized that many children couldn’t express their feelings so she made her own manipulatives to help children understand their own feelings. In the Moodster products, Daniels focused on the primary moods children experience: happy, sad, afraid, angry, and loving.

The newest Moodsters product is The Moodster Mirror and coordinating storybook.  The Moodster Mirror is designed to show children how to read emotions on other’s faces.  When they look in the mirror, they try to make faces that reflect different feelings and are then better able to see what those feelings look like to others.  They can turn the dial on the mirror to different characters that tell them about different feelings.  Each character coordinates with a different feeling.  They each tell you to make a certain face like that character (i.e “Make a happy face like me!”) and then tells ways you can show that emotion.  My favorite is “Time for a snuggle!” Seriously, anything that encourages my not-so-cuddly little guy to give me a snuggle is a winner!

The storybook is called A Time to Be Kind.  There are a few things that set The Moodsters books apart from other children’s books.  The first is the “Guidelines for Grownups” section in the beginning.  This guide gives some guiding questions you can ask your children while reading the story so that you can have a more in-depth conversation about the feelings of the book characters and their own interactions with their friends and family.  The second is that the books use The Moodsters characters to explain emotions.  When one character is sad, The Moodsters explain that some clues that might show us a friend is sad are slumped shoulders and tears in his eyes.  This makes it easier for the child to show that emotion in the Moodster Mirror and recognize it when they see it in someone else, too.

The Moodsters products are available at Target.

A SIMPLE GIVEAWAY

One reader will win a Moodster Mirror and Storybook.
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