Jennifer Loiske has co-written a book with Pikkuli’s creator, Metsämarja Aittokoski and Sanna Mattila. Little Bird, Big Emotions – Pikkuli’s Emotional Skills Guide, will be released on 15th of October 2023 in Finnish!
Written together with early childhood education professionals, Pikkuli’s emotional skills guide leads to emotional education and supports the shared emotional skills moments and interaction between children and adults. The Finnish Pikkuli series is known for its lovable characters, whose strong expression inspires children to reflect on their own emotions. Pikkuli has already been exploited in emotional skills work in early childhood education.
The book is based on the Pikkuli pedagogy, which is a program for practicing emotional and interaction skills developed for children aged 0–8 years. It exploits the materials of the Pikkuli product family – books, episodes of an animated series, emotional cards, games and lesson plans for early childhood education – through which the child learns emotional skills that carry well into adulthood together with Pikkuli.
Small Bird, Big Emotions goes through a wide range of emotions and provides practical tools for constructively expressing and regulating a child’s emotions. At the same time, the book supports adults in raising children and also offers exercises for dealing with the adult’s own emotions.
Metsämarja Aittokoski is a director, screenwriter, performer, creator of the world of Pikkuli and mother of three children. The spark for creating Pikkuli was sparked by situations in her own family life. With her, this book is written by Jennifer Loiske (KK, early childhood education teacher, author) and Sanna Mattila (KM, Special education teacher in early childhood education), who has worked as an early childhood education teacher in China for a long time, and who uses Pikkuli pedagogy in her work with children on a daily basis.