My Bag of Feelings

MY BAG OF FEELINGS is a cute, rhyming board book about emotions. The book features a young girl who reflects on different times she experienced specific feelings, such as happy, sad, proud, and scared. The concrete examples are told in rhyme and manage to stay positive and hopeful throughout, even when talking about fear and anger. The book itself is formed as a bag, with specific items from each experience poking out as reminders of those situations and emotions.

What I loved: This is a really fun way to teach about different feelings with clear examples where the emotions were experienced that little ones can relate to. For instance, for anger, she discusses a time when her sister took her toy without asking. She told her sister that taking it was bad, and they ended up hugging and making up afterwards. This example is one that toddlers and preschoolers will readily understand, and the others are in the same vein.

The rhyming text rolls off the tongue easily and makes this a smooth read that will be fun for children to listen to. The illustrations are simple but show the emotions through use of color and simplified faces.

What left me wanting more: While the book manages to stay hopeful and positive, even when talking about fear, sadness, and anger, it brushes these emotions aside really quickly. Though it can be tough with such a short text, more exploration on these emotions could have been helpful, such as talking about the strong feelings or more understanding coming out of them. For instance, in the anger example, she tells her sister that taking the toy was wrong but then they just hug and it's over which seemed a bit too simple. On the flip side, the brevity does make this work well for young toddlers and caregivers can delve deeper into how to handle these.

Final verdict: MY BAG OF FEELINGS uses rhymes and bright colors to help begin to teach children about emotions. This would work well for toddlers and preschoolers.