How children are taught to control their feelings and how they resist this emotional management through cultural production. Today, even young kids talk to each other across social media by referencing memes,songs, and movements, constructing a common vernacular that resists parental, educational, and media imperatives to name their feelings and thus control their bodies. Over the past two decades, children’s television programming has provided a therapeutic site for the processing of emotions such as anger, but in doing so has enforced normative structures of feeling that, Jane Juffer argues, weaken the intensity and range of children’s affective experiences. Don’t Use Your Words! seeks to challenge those norms, highlighting the ways that kids express their feelings through cultural productions including drawings, fan art, memes, YouTube videos, dance moves, and conversations while gaming online. Focusing on kids between ages five and nine, Don’t Use Your Words! situates these productions in specific contexts, including immigration policy referenced in drawings by Central American children just released from detention centers and electoral politics as contested in kids’ artwork expressing their anger at Trump’s victory. Taking issue with the mainstream tendency to speak on behalf of children, Juffer argues that kids have the agency to answer for themselves: what does it feel like to be a kid?

Understanding how the ways that teachers talk to children helps them to develop language skills.

USE YOUR WORDS introduces the art of creative nonfiction to women who want to give written expression to their lives as mothers. Written by award-winning teacher and writer, Kate Hopper, this book will help women find the heart of their writing, learn to use motherhood as a lens through which to write the world, and turn their motherhood stories into art. Each chapter of USE YOUR WORDS focuses on an element of craft and contains a lecture, a published essay, and writing exercises that will serve as jumping-off points for the readers’ own writing. Chapter topics include: the importance of using concrete details, an overview of creative nonfiction as a genre, character development, voice, humor, tense and writing the “hard stuff,” reflection and back-story, structure, revision, and publishing. The content of each lecture is aligned with the essay/poem in that chapter to help readers more easily grasp the elements of craft being discussed. Together the chapters provide a unique opportunity for mother writers to learn and grow as writers. USE YOUR WORDS takes the approach that creative writing can be taught, and this underscores each chapter. When students learn to read like writers, to notice how a piece is put together, and to question the choices a writer makes, they begin to think like writers. When they learn to ground their writing in concrete, sensory details and begin to understand how to create believable characters and realistic dialogue, their own writing improves. USE YOUR WORDS reflects Kate’s style as a teacher, guiding the reader in a straightforward, nurturing, and passionate voice. As one student noted in a class evaluation: “Kate is a born writer and teacher, and her enthusiasm for essays about motherhood and for teaching the nuts and bolts of writing so that ordinary mothers have the tools to write their stories is a gift to the world. She is raising the value of motherhood in our society as she helps mothers build their confidence and strengthen their game as writers.”

With gentle encouragement, this book teaches children that they can think before speaking, choose what to say and how to say it, and find positive ways to respond when others use unkind words. The importance of saying “I’m sorry” is reinforced. Includes tips for parents and caregivers.

Kitty-Kat is a good kitten, but she doesn't use her words. She points, growls, stamps and scowls, but she doesn't say what she wants!

From the classrooms of Yale and Harvard comes Deb Sofield's inspirational, instructional guide to help you conquer your fear of public speaking. Speak Without Fear transforms our old ways of thinking about public speaking and provides the reader with the necessary tools to move beyond the fe