BONUS video: read-aloud of Moody Moody Cars

One of my publishers, Magination Press, made a video of me reading aloud my picture book (for ages 4-8), Moody Moody Cars. The book is based on “paredolia,” which is our tendency to see faces in things.

When my kids were little, we used to play a game of guessing the emotion of different car faces. To me, the faces are obvious, but I’ve learned that some people can’t see them. How about you?

I hope you enjoy the read-aloud. Here’s the video. An Educator Guide and the Note to Parents are below.

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*** EDUCATOR GUIDE ***

Note to Parents

Moody Moody Cars is a playful approach to helping children learn about emotions. It’s based on pareidolia, which is our tendency to see faces in things. Most children ages four years and up know that cars don’t really have feelings, but it’s entertaining and intriguing to see how these cars look as though they do! Figuring out the cars’ expressions can help your child learn to recognize, label, and talk about these common emotions.

Understanding facial expressions of emotion is an essential skill that helps children navigate the social world. It allows children to know, for example, when a sibling is annoyed, or a parent sees danger, or a classmate wants to be friends. One study found that children’s ability to interpret facial emotions at five years of age predicts how well they do socially and academically—even four years later. Research also shows that talking about feelings and practicing labeling them can help children increase their understanding of emotions. So, look for opportunities to talk about emotions in books, movies, and daily life.

Eye-tracking studies show that babies are very interested in faces—they’ll stare at two dots and a curve arranged like a face longer than any other arrangement—but it takes children a surprisingly long time to develop the ability to recognize specific emotions:

• At two years old, children are only able to categorize photos of emotional faces as either happy or not. They tend to label all non-happy faces as angry.

• Around age three, children learn to recognize sad faces.

• Around age four, they can accurately categorize angry faces and distinguish these from other negative emotions. Being able to recognize fear, surprise, and disgust comes even later.

• Children show marked improvement in their accuracy at labeling facial expressions between ages five and seven, and their speed of labeling emotions and their ability to identify less intense emotions improves noticeably between ages seven and ten.

Learning to understand emotions may be especially important for boys. Too often, boys (and men) somehow get the message that emotions are “girly” and therefore not for them. But boys have feelings, too! As infants, boys are actually more expressive than girls, but by five or six years old, boys are less likely than girls to express hurt or distress.

Moody Moody Cars is a fun way to help all children develop emotional literacy, which is the ability to read feelings in ourselves and others.