Our youngest son can melt like butter on a hot day. It’s that zone where a child can become overwhelmed by the situation around them and any parent to a kid under 10 has seen it. They’ll hold their breath, lie on the floor, scream, become unresponsive, scratch themselves, or worse. There’s a really sweet video that’s making the viral rounds now showing an older brother demonstrating to his younger sibling how simply breathing deeply can calm you down. Breathe Deep, Little Sheep, A Calm-Down Book for Kids by Jessica Lee with illustrations by Lucia Wilkinson accomplishes the same thing for kids through second grade.
For the record, we’ve done the breathe deep/count down from ten, way of having our children calm down. The results were mixed as he’s was intent on finding his own ‘way’ of finding temporary inner peace. We’re still doing it. Our 11-year-old breathes out twice and rolls his eyes. His younger brother has resulted in saying “I know, I know”, before not doing it and melting down.
Breathe Deep, Little Sheep is not all about deep breathing as a way for young children to learn the methods that will allow them to calm down. The book allows children to know that they can shake it out, talk about it, breathe, exhale, break it down into little steps, enjoy nature, or other effective steps. It’s not all about zen, massaging chakras, breathing through your nose-or is it breathing through your mouth?
Every four pages tell a quick and simply stated story. For example, we see a puppy that is hiding under a bed because it’s scared about a storm. The illustrations are soft, large, and very pleasant to look at. They’re also not too babyish so that those readers who are older than pre-k won’t be put off by the book. On the second set of pages, we see the dog, imagining itself in a giant field of flowers. Teachers: This is also an effective method to deal with students who aren’t listening while you’re teaching a lesson.
Penguins are frustrated. The hedgehog wants to hide. The rabbit is stuck on a frozen pond and getting across it seems too big to tackle. Each situation is resolved using cope management techniques that many adults still need to work on.
When I was reading this to kindergarten kids they were chiming in with various phrases. “I do that”, “sometimes I do that when my little brother is mean” or “after I lose a soccer game I do that” were just a couple of real-life examples that I heard coming from the group of 18 five-year-olds. The point is that they knew, or had heard of these techniques. Whether or not they use them when they’re frustrated is another story. The same goes for our nine-year-old. He knows what he needs to do when he needs to calm down, but many times he doesn’t.
That’s where Breathe Deep, Little Sheep would help those early elementary students. The repetition that’s needed for certain life skills that are presented in a soothing illustrated book can teach much more efficiently for some young people. It also helps that those young readers can see a scared puppy on the pages. Internally, those kids might know what to do, but seeing the words put the puppy into calming, meadow-viewing action will help those same readers do the same in their lives.
Breathe Deep, Little Sheep-A Calm-Down Book for Kids is by Jessica Lee with illustrations by Lucia Wilkinson and available on Andrews McMeel Publishing.
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