The
idea for The Blob Visual Emotional Thesaurus came from my experiences teaching
writing in the classroom. Like most teachers, the need to encourage children to
edit and improve their work is an endless task. Having a pile of thesauruses in
the middle of each set of desks is helpful to further enrich children's
vocabulary.
This
was especially true when it came to developing characters feelings -teachers
who encourage children to include this in their stories usually end up getting
happy or sad! When I told them to look for alternatives in the thesaurus, they
would select the most unusual, because they had no idea what these words meant.
In the
Visual Emotional Thesaurus, this has been overcome in two ways. Firstly, every
feeling has an image to visualise how a character might feel. When trying to
use words outside of their experience, that is essential. Secondly, a visual
range of feelings has been developed so that children can select how intensely
their character might be feeling.
This
book has been developed to empower writers and to reduce the need for teachers
to have to intervene during the redrafting process.
The
Blobs have been used to illustrate the feelings. They have no gender, age,
fashion or colour, enabling all children to read and identify with the
feelings. Blobs have been used in all key stages of education, which means that
confident infant readers can access these emotional words as well as older
children.
- Ian Long
Speechmark illustrator of Blobs
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