How to Tantrum Like a Champion: Ten Small Ways to Temper Big Feelings

Sensible self-soothing techniques drive this matter-of-fact rhyming picture book about managing strong emotions. Beginning text urges bodily awareness in the face of everyday challenges. When “your breath becomes a hurricane” and “your face turns hot and red,” Wolf’s useful regulating techniques stand by with activities that incorporate breathwork, movement, comfort, and other sensory-aware approaches. Readers are invited to “fly on tiny whisper wings/ as if you’re a mosquito.// Wrap up in a blanket/ and pretend you’re a burrito.” The tactile dimensionality of Morris’s digitally finished tissue paper collages enlivens vignettes of kids, depicted with various skin tones, experiencing big feels and then settling into calmer states. The title’s winking humor becomes abundantly clear by the end: tantruming like a champion, it turns out, means circumventing the act altogether. Ages 3–7. (Sept.)