General Info
Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, by Michael Rosen and Quentin Blake published by A Boston Globe-Horn Book Honors.

This book provides the reader with an incredibly genuine, real look into what kind of feelings and thoughts occur during depression. The author writes the story in first person, which allows the reader to feel like they are directly reading the thoughts of another person, enhancing the reality of what the author is feeling. It is the best book to talk about depression to children because there is no sugar coating, this book is dark and sad-which is what depression is. While still being truthful and deeply sad this book allows students to see how to deal with depression despite it being, “very big. It’s everywhere. All over me.” The author describes how he continues to live through the small moments and joy’s in his life and importantly, through writing. Half way through the book the author tells the reader, “I write:” and provides a poem about sadness. Using specifically this page in the story, an instructor can launch an entire lesson on how writing can be a therapeutic tool and how to use narrative writing to help express emotions and feelings, which in turn can improve mental health and well being. In summation, content area would be language arts and writing with any grade level. For second graders, I would read this story aloud and the lesson would be about identifying feeling and emotions and talking about how to write about them using this book as our mentor text.

Core Integration:
As I noted before the author talks about how he writes about his feelings of sadness, I think that this is a perfect exemplary text to show students how to write about their feelings not only in the poem he provides but throughout the entire book. In a real aloud with younger students (like second graders) it would be important to read through the entire book without stopping very much and just focus on the story. At the end of the first read through the class could discuss themes of the story and how they felt during the story. The second time around reading, the instructor could focus on how the author’s expressed his feelings and how we uses writing tools to help the reader understand what he is going through. This book is easy for second graders to model from because the writing is not embellished or high level, the writing stays simple but the author conveys deep meaning through it. In this way, this book can be a perfect way to discuss content area like expressive narratives while also addressing feelings, emotions and how to appropriately deal with those experiences.

Students could keep a creative writing journal and in it have a section devoted to expressing emotions through a healthy, productive venue like the one introduced through this lesson.

Standards:

• MEH1.2.2: Identify appropriate ways to express and deal with feelings
  • HBO 1 – Express feelings in a healthy way
• Learning Target: Students will be able to use writing through a narrative to express emotions and feelings.
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.2.3: Write narratives in which they recount a well-elaborated event or short sequence of events, include details to describe actions, thoughts, and feelings, use temporal words to signal event order, and provide a sense of closure.

Found at Wilson Library in the Children’s Section, 4th floor: PZ7.R6732