Additional information
by Lydia Bowers (Author), Isabel Muñoz (Illustrator)
Deja helps young children recognize their emotions by listening to their bodies
Body awareness is a key foundation of consent. We Listen to Our Bodies gives children a vocabulary to understand and communicate their feelings, develop personal boundaries, and build their social and emotional skills. Through body awareness and recognizing how emotions physically manifest, young children can listen to their bodies for clues about how they're feeling. Their bodies might feel shaky when worried or like one big sigh when calm and relaxed. By recognizing that physical sensations are trying to communicate something, children can understand when they feel unsafe, calm, or in need of healthy touch. We Listen to Our Bodies follows Deja and her preschool classmates as they learn to build emotional self-awareness by listening to the physical cues of their bodies. Using the book as a read-aloud, educators and families can model the language Deja's teachers use to support children as they learn body awareness. The author, who hosts workshops and trainings on teaching consent for families and early childhood educators around the country, offers additional activities in the back of the book. Digital content includes a song from Peaceful Schools with downloadable MP3 files and sheet music. We Say What's Okay Series Centered around a class of preschoolers, the We Say What's Okay series helps teach young children the social and emotional skills they need to understand the complexities of consent. Each book covers a consent theme, such as how to recognize the physical sensations that emotions create, look for body language cues, ask for and listen to choices, and know that our bodies have value. With believable, everyday situations and diverse characters, children can see themselves and others reflected in each story--and develop a vocabulary to communicate consent and feelings. Every book in the series is accompanied by a song from Peaceful Schools with downloadable MP3 files and sheet music.Author Biography
Lydia Bowers is a speaker, consultant, and trainer who happily exists in the Venn diagram overlap between early childhood and sex education. After spending almost two decades of working directly with children as a classroom teacher and a parent, she is passionate about reframing sexuality conversations. Lydia now teaches families and educators how to talk to children about subjects like gender, reproduction, and abuse. When she's not traveling around the country for conferences and speaking engagements, she lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children and adds to her growing collection of children's book character tattoos as often as she can.
