【原版有声书分享】When Sophie's Feelings Are Really, Really Hurt

About the story
After I finished When Sophie Gets Angry, I had no thought of a sequel. I was happy with Sophie, but I didn’t want to make any more Sophie books. I wanted only to make books about science, and so I kept working with Penny Chisholm on our books in the Sunlight Series.

But then my editor, Bonnie Verburg, had an idea.

“How about having Sophie paint a picture of her tree,” she suggested, “but she paints the tree blue because she loves it and it makes her happy, and then she paints the sky orange, but her teacher doesn’t like her picture at all.” Bonnie wasn’t sure how to resolve the situation, but that was the setup.

I put it off for a year or two and kept working on the Sunlight books. But the situation was too familiar to me to let it go.

One of the most frequent difficulties for children in school is that they are misunderstood and reprimanded just when they are trying hard to accomplish a task. This happens so frequently in art class that by about the third or fourth grade, children ‘know’ which (very few) students in their class are the ‘artists’, and ‘know’ that all the others are not. I’ve taught art as a volunteer in both elementary and high school, and it’s been consistently clear that every child can express her/himself visually in ways that affect others emotionally and aesthetically, and can paint and draw far beyond what they had originally expected of themselves. But it takes teacher encouragement to experiment and keep trying, and her – or his – support to look, analyze and appreciate the work of both known artists and other students, and then to incorporate others’ ideas in one’s own work.

This is the approach I wanted to show in When Sophie’s Feelings Are Really, Really Hurt.

So I worked on the new Sophie story. Since four members of my family are teachers who work very hard to support and understand their students, I could not make the teacher the one who misunderstood Sophie’s intention for her picture. So I made the confused critic be her friend, Alex, and I made the teacher be the person who does understand and encourage her.

I hope the story gives children and teachers a way to look at, feel, talk about and MAKE pictures that enable them to realize that they, too, are artists. It gives a beginning vocabulary for discussing visual art and ways of seeing not only the content – the tree and the animals in the tree – but also some elements of painting, for example: color and its emotional effects, position of figures on the page, and space.

Hopefully the story also reminds teachers and students that we can deal with differences in ways that are supportive of Everybody.

关于这个故事

当我完成《当苏菲生气》后，我没有想到续集。我和苏菲在一起很开心，但是我不想再做苏菲的书了。我只想写关于科学的书，所以我一直和佩妮·齐索姆合作我们的《阳光系列》的书。

但是后来我的编辑邦妮·韦尔伯格有了一个主意。

“让索菲给她的树画一幅画怎么样，”她建议道，“但是她把树涂成蓝色，因为她喜欢它，这让她很开心，然后她把天空涂成橙色，但是她的老师一点也不喜欢她的画。”邦妮不知道如何解决这种情况，但这是设置。

我把它推迟了一两年，继续写《阳光》的书。但是情况太熟悉了，我放不下。

孩子们在学校最常见的困难之一是，他们在努力完成一项任务的时候，却被误解和斥责。这种情况在艺术课上经常发生，以至于到了三四年级，孩子们“知道”他们班里哪些(很少)学生是“艺术家”，而“知道”其他人不是。我在小学和高中都当过志愿者，我一直很清楚，每个孩子都可以用影响他人情感和审美的方式直观地表达自己，并且可以画出远远超出他们最初对自己期望的东西。但是，需要老师的鼓励来进行实验和不断尝试，需要她或他的支持来观察、分析和欣赏知名艺术家和其他学生的作品，然后将他人的想法融入自己的作品。

这就是我想在《当苏菲的感情真的真的很受伤》中展示的方法。

所以我写了新的苏菲故事。因为我的四个家庭成员都是努力支持和理解他们学生的老师，我不能让老师误解苏菲对她的画的意图。所以我让困惑的评论家成为她的朋友亚历克斯，我让老师成为理解和鼓励她的人。

我希望这个故事能给孩子们和老师一个看、感受、谈论和制作图片的方法，让他们意识到他们也是艺术家。它为讨论视觉艺术提供了一个初步的词汇，并提供了不仅可以看到内容——树和树上的动物——还可以看到绘画的一些元素，例如:颜色及其情感效果、页面上图形的位置和空间。

希望这个故事也能提醒老师和学生，我们可以用支持每个人的方式来处理差异。

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