I Feel It Too
I Feel It Too is an interactive and educational tool for young learners, specifically kindergarten age, in order to identify, explore, process, and learn about more complex emotions that kids encounter as they develop more intellectual and social skills.
“This interactive narrative can help your child explore the nuanced spectrum of emotion and how to deal with more intense and complicated emotions. This workbook draws from the direct expertise and experience of behavior specialists and researchers in order to cultivate a space where art and play enable a child to learn, reflect, and discover - and also just have fun! With stickers, stories, puzzles, and activities, this workbook will ignite your child’s reflective imagination!”
Iteration 1
In order to even get to the idea of a workbook, I went through a lot of brainstorming. And that meant a lot of writing.
Which turned into a lot of research…
Once I figured out what I actually wanted the book to be about, I took giant pieces of paper and just dumped every image that came to mind as I began to think about what kind of visual style and vocabulary this book would have. From there, characters and stories began to evolve.
With the first few stories written and illustrated, I had a small batch printed and hand-bound them to make the first prototype of what the final booklet would look like. Along with the storybook, I wanted to have a definition guide with memorable emoji-like expression icons on one side and kid-friendly definitions for parents to use when they’re going through the storybook. As the characters go through certain emotions, kids can identify them and parents can open up conversation about them and the characters.
But I wanted it to be more interactive for the kids. So it was back to the drawing board…
In my journey back to the drawing board, I explored some more articles and research related to children’s learning and development. One article I came across was about children’s associations of emotions with colors.
I reached out to some childhood psychology experts at my university and childhood behavior specialists. The next few pages are notes and idea dumps from the various interviews.
So I came up with a card game where kids could match the emojis with the colors and explore their own color associations with their own perceptions and experiences of emotion. The card game would also include definitions and vocabulary for each emotion to include a learning component.
I even tested out the card game on my roommate. But if my 20 year old roommate had difficulty understanding the intention with the cards, I realized kindergarteners would have an even tougher time. So the card game was scrapped and I turned to kindergarten teachers, educators, and behavior specialists to learn about how to engage young kids.
Then all that was left to do was to write and illustrate the final stories and activities. The final iteration was scaled up to a luxurious 8.5” x 11” to make room for the puzzle and drawing activities, sticker sheets, and more stories that were added.
