There’s something unintentionally funny about a book called Get the Wiggles Out. Your silly adult brain envisions a toddler showdown with dancing and singing that involves non-Australian-based intellectual property, fending off other colored characters. Once you see it with your mind’s eye, you can’t unsee it. Thankfully, Get the Wiggles Out: Playful Ways to Embrace Every Feeling (Everyday Feelings with Sesame Street) stars the team who live where the air is sweet.
Get the Wiggles Out is not a book that toddlers can read by themselves the first time they pick it up. The content will be entertaining for them. Ages three through seven will want to look at the illustrations by themselves. However, the raison d’etre for the book is to introduce coping mechanisms when young ages encounter emotions that make them go sideways.
How can a toddler learn to deal with being overwhelmed? Toddlers get angry. They know that they don’t like it when that happens, but what can they do? If you’re feeling happy that’s great, what about other or more energetic versions of happiness?
Get the Wiggles Out sets the book up like a scavenger hunt. Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus let audiences know that they should look for the different feelings they’ll discover in the book. On the page opposite that they’ll see a human, Emily McTate, PhD, LP, ABBP. Those letters at the end of her last name mean that she’s a Pediatric Psychologist at Mayo Clinic.
The book features characters from Sesame Street who are out and about town. The Count is helping Oscar the Grouch who is especially grumpy. Count leads the two in a Volcano Breath, a coping exercise where you spread your hands as far out from your body as you while taking in a slow, deep breath. Cookie Monster is at the store, but his favorite cookies aren’t there and this is very disappointing. The chef encourages Cookie to shake his arms and legs, and sure enough, he’s soon back his blue, happy self.
Grover tries the Grounding Tree Pose when he gets overwhelmed. Wes is feeling shy, so he does a power pose to pump up his confidence.
Get the Wiggles Out: Playful Ways to Embrace Every Feeling is an illustrated book that is meant to be used. It will have to be read to young audiences the first couple of times they engage with it. However, that is only to reinforce how the characters in the book are feeling as a result of their surroundings. Once young ages start to associate the Octopus Dance with being too excited, they’ll take the lesson of the book to heart.
Actually, the younger ages will enjoy the bright Sesame Street characters, and the movement that the book encourages them to do. The older ages will resonate with the frustrations and movements first, and then pay face time to Elmo. The adults who read the book the first couple of times will ham up the dialogue and need to sell the movements. These are coping strategies that kids will benefit from as move from the toddler years through elementary and middle school. I see a middle school student every day that knows these strategies in theory, but constantly doesn’t do them when they assist them. It is frustrating to know that there are relatively simple mechanisms to control their stress, to an extent, but to not have them do it.
There are lots of things happening in those small, but growing minds. Get the Wiggles Out: Playful Ways to Embrace Every Feeling can help the younger ones deal with their frustration, energy or anger. At the end of the book there’s a recap of all the ways people were feeling and the techniques that allowed them to feel better. This is written at a level for older readers, but is a good reminder of the lessons that these young ages would benefit from.
Get the Wiggles Out: Playful Ways to Embrace Every Feeling is by Anna Anderhagen with illustrations by Hisashi Maeda and is available on Mayo Clinic Press Kids.
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