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SOUL Seeking: Emotional education book
For her SOUL Seeking project, Grade 10 student Sissi L. wrote the first in a series of emotional education books for children. Her first book, “A Journey With Anger,” is aimed at children aged 8 to 12, and helps educate about productive and helpful ways of managing emotions.
Sissi’s inspiration came from coping with her own emotional responses to the pandemic, and finding that most often she was trying to deal with anxiety and anger without having the right psychological tools at her disposal. While in quarantine, she developed her own seven-step process for dealing with anger and used it to help identify triggers for her anger and manage the emotion.
“I didn’t have any kind of emotional education myself as a child, but realized in developing my seven-step process that learning emotional management early in life could be helpful,” Sissi says. “I’m also really interested in cognitive and developmental psychology and working with children, and this project helped me clarify that.”
Her book is structured a bit like a workbook and can be used independently or in a workshop setting. Readers are able to work through the steps and come up with their own endings for situations, with examples provided. One of the challenges Sissi faced was coming up with age-appropriate examples and situations for the book, but she persevered and is really proud of herself for finishing the book. The Rev, who provided a review for Sissi’s book, described it as “relevant and accessible and full of profound wisdom.”
Sissi hopes to use her book as the basis of educational seminars with children, which she would like to organize when she’s back home in China. In the meantime, the next book she plans to develop in the series is about sadness, which, for Sissi, seems like a logical next step on her journey to bring emotional awareness and understanding to young people.
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“I didn’t have any kind of emotional education myself as a child, but realized in developing my seven-step process that learning emotional management early in life could be helpful,” Sissi says. “I’m also really interested in cognitive and developmental psychology and working with children, and this project helped me clarify that.”
Her book is structured a bit like a workbook and can be used independently or in a workshop setting. Readers are able to work through the steps and come up with their own endings for situations, with examples provided. One of the challenges Sissi faced was coming up with age-appropriate examples and situations for the book, but she persevered and is really proud of herself for finishing the book. The Rev, who provided a review for Sissi’s book, described it as “relevant and accessible and full of profound wisdom.”
Sissi hopes to use her book as the basis of educational seminars with children, which she would like to organize when she’s back home in China. In the meantime, the next book she plans to develop in the series is about sadness, which, for Sissi, seems like a logical next step on her journey to bring emotional awareness and understanding to young people.
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