Featured Titles: Free Spirit Publishing
I Remember My Breath: Mindful Breathing for All My Feelings by Lynn Rummel
Published by Free Spirit Publishing
World rights available
Age Range: 4 - 8
Visualization and mindful breathing for kids helps children recognize and manage their feelings.
Young children have so many feelings. Without accessible emotional self-regulation strategies, children may communicate their big feelings with negative behaviors, bullying, or withdrawing. I Remember My Breath provides an introduction to visualization and mindful breathing for kids as an emotional self-regulation strategy.
Mindful breathing focuses on breathing and how emotions feel in the body. I Remember My Breath guides young children to identify the emotion they’re feeling and use visualization and breathing to calm themselves and manage their feelings. Teaching mindful breathing for kids as an emotional self-regulation strategy also helps children build emotional literacy and body awareness.
With its imaginative, vivid imagery and rhythmic writing style that mimics the breath, I Remember My Breath is a book that children who are experiencing big emotions can turn—and return—to for support and comfort. A special section for adults provides additional information and activities to reinforce the book’s message.
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As two children confront a barrage of emotions, mindful breathing helps them to feel grounded in Rummel and Bunting’s earnest picture book. Accompanying the titular refrain ‘I remember my breath,’ metaphor offers a helpful aid for emotional self-regulation.― Publishers Weekly
This book is a treasure. Readers will follow a boy and a girl through very relatable circumstances that make them feel worried, excited, sad, nervous, angry, and embarrassed, name the feelings, and remember their breath to manage all those big emotions.—Amazon review
Lynn Rummel is a licensed speech-language pathologist and certified professional school counselor. While working as an elementary school counselor for nine years, she taught mindfulness and breath awareness strategies to many of her students. Currently, Lynn operates a pediatric speech and language therapy private practice in South Florida, where she lives with her husband, two children, and pug. She specializes in articulation, literacy, and social and emotional skills. Children's picture books are among her favorite therapy materials for all ages.
Tap and Rap, Move and Groove by
Connie Bergstein Dow
Published by Free Spirit Publishing
World rights available
Age Range: 3 -8
Young children play and learn together with lively dance chants.
Tap and Rap, Move and Groove brings movement into homes and early childhood classrooms with rhythmic chants for children to move and dance to. Designed to link movement, language, and rhythm, the chants are for children and adults to do together, saying the words while performing the movement prompts.
Step and clap, step and clap,
As we do our waving rap!
Wave your arms, way up high.
Reach your fingers to the sky.
Woven throughout Tap and Rap, Move and Groove are many opportunities for children to contribute their own ideas and explore movement possibilities, nurturing creative thinking, problem-solving, and self-expression. Dance chants also provide language benefits, as children incorporate new vocabulary, recognize rhythm, repeat the sequence of words and movements, and learn how the chants partner with specific movements.
No music is required for the dance chants, but it can be added. Tap and Rap, Move and Groove includes information for adults who want to enhance and expand the dance activities with music, props, etc.
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Author Connie Bergstein Dow and illustrator Debbie Palen have created a joy-filled guide to truly imaginative movement activities. Tap and Rap, Move and Groove is a treasure chest of thoughtfully developed and playfully combined words, sounds, rhythms, numbers, and illustrations expressing a range of emotions. This classroom guide is sure to spark the imaginations and lift the spirits of young children.—Christopher Watson, Ph.D., former co-director, Center for Early Learning and Development, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Connie Bergstein Dow’s new book is filled with ideas on how to reach and interest young children. Teachers of this creative and energetic age group will gain so many wonderful ideas from this delightful book. In addition, the illustrations are absolutely marvelous and inspiring.—Elizabeth Weil Bergmann, retired dance director, Harvard University
Connie Bergstein Dow has an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the author of two books for teachers: One, Two, What Can I Do? Dance and Music for the Whole Day and Dance, Turn, Hop, Learn! Enriching Movement Activities for Preschoolers.
She has also written a preschool teacher handbook for WeTHRIVE! with movement activities that address the Ohio Early Learning Content Standards for language arts and mathematics and contributed to the development of a dance curriculum for the Ohio Department of Education Model Arts Curriculum. Connie has also written articles for Highlights High Five, Teaching Young Children and Young Children (NAEYC), and Early Childhood News. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Blaze Your Own Trail: Ideas for Teens to Find and Pursue Your Purpose by Justin Ashley
Published by Free Spirit Publishing
World rights available
Age Range: 13 - 18
Empower teens to build their own paths with strategies that encourage self-discovery, autonomy, and connection. Blaze Your Own Trail invites teens to consider their values, goals, and interests, and take steps toward building the life—and blazing the trail—they want for themselves.
Teens follow the three sections of the book—the inner path, the outer path, and the onward path—to explore a breadth of topics, from developing a vision for their future and boosting their self-regulation strategies and emotional intelligence to making time for rest, practicing gratitude, and connecting with others.
This student-facing partner to The Balanced Teacher Path presents teens with ideas for seeking purpose, joy, and balance in their lives. To enrich and inform the book, award-winning teacher Justin Ashley surveyed the teens he's worked with. Blaze Your Own Trail gives teens the freedom to read what's most relevant to them in the moment with short, easy-to-digest chapters.
Far from a prescriptive guidebook, Blaze Your Own Trail supports teens in their journey to creating their own path—and destination.
Justin Ashley is an award-winning teacher, motivational speaker, author, and public education advocate from Charlotte, North Carolina, where he began teaching in 2007. He is also a highly sought-after speaker for professional development. He has been an inspirational keynote presenter for thousands of current and future teachers, creating an atmosphere that bounces back and forth between rapt silence and raucous laughter. In 2013, he became the only teacher ever to win both North Carolina History Teacher of the Year and North Carolina Social Studies Teacher of the Year in the same year.
Free Spirit has had the same mission for nearly 40 years: to provide children and teens—and the adults who care for and about them—with the tools they need to think for themselves, overcome challenges, and make a difference in the world.
Here are some moments that we have shared with Free Spirit Publishing over the years. We are so happy to have them onboard and we are very excited about their new titles. Thank you for your ongoing participation and support. Our buyers love your beautiful books, as do we!
