A story about treating friends with respect and kindness, even when feelings are hurt.
Hurt feelings are no fun—so when a girl feels her friend wasn’t nice, all she can think to do is to hurt her friend in return. Little does the girl know, she’s leaning on a wise, old tree who has seen this sort of hurtful cycle before. Elm tree is ready to lend some gentle wisdom and help the girl find a more kind and respectful way to work out her friendship troubles.
Follow the story through a few surprises and chuckles as the girl learns lessons on respect, empathy, and how to persevere through a difficult moment. In the end, children see how good it feels to treat others as you’d like to be treated.
Find free printable activities that work with the story and build on the lessons on respect, friendship, and perseverance at TalkingTreeBooks.com .
Be Bigger is Book 2 in the Talking with Trees Series of values books for kids. Written for grades K-4, Talking with Trees books and teaching resources engage children emotionally, helping them learn how to use their hearts and minds to guide them toward building good character traits. Talking with Trees books teach social emotional skills through lessons around honesty, respect, responsibility, and empathy
Colleen will tell you that having four kids is great because you can say things like, “It is not ok to roast marshmallows over my scented candle,” and because they are a never-ending supply of material for books. After 15 years in marketing and freelance writing, Colleen first turned to children’s book writing as a project to raise money for a foster home in Beijing, China, where her family was living at the time. Super Easy Storytelling, her first children’s book (written with her daughter), is about how to tell stories together on the fly— which was the family’s way of calming the chaos that comes with four kids in a car, restaurant, or really anyplace they needed to behave. The Talking with Trees series is thanks to the kids as well. Colleen wrote the series based on real experiences with tearful children facing the tough business of growing up into good people. Colleen and her husband live in California with a houseful.