Breathe First, Talk Second: The Behavior Script Inside Book 13

Ask a preschool teacher what they want more help with and the answer is rarely phonics. It is the child who hits, the child who melts down at cleanup, the child who says "you copied me" and shoves. NAEYC's own Guidance and Challenging Behaviors hub calls guidance and behavior two of the most popular and pressing topics for the profession, and the Spring 2026 issue of its magazine Educating Young Children runs a column titled "Advice for Guiding Children's Behavior." Behavior is where the field is spending its attention.

Where the topic comes from

California writes the same concern into its 2024 Preschool/TK Learning Foundations. The Social and Emotional Development domain has a sub-strand called Regulating Emotions and Behaviors, and the Approaches to Learning domain has a whole strand on Executive Functioning, with Inhibitory Control as one of its three sub-strands. Inhibitory control is the technical name for what a four-year-old does when they want to grab and do not. The foundations treat it as a skill that grows, not a trait a child has or lacks.

There is a reason both documents care. A child in the grip of a big feeling cannot reach language. Telling a flooded three-year-old to "use your words" asks for the one thing they cannot do until the body settles. The order matters: calm first, then words.

What Book 13 does with that order

In Kit and the Copycat, a kid at school makes something that looks just like Kit's Steady Sippy and says they made it first. Kit feels yucky inside, like something was taken. He wants to yell. This is where most books would have him yell and learn a lesson.

Instead a friend named Elias shows up with an hourglass. He flips it. "Let's take a breath." Only after the sand runs does anyone talk. Then Kit says the three brave sentences the book is built around:

"I feel sad when that happens." "I want to talk about it." "Can we work it out?"

And the other kid, who was not a villain, says the line that ends most preschool conflicts when a grown-up gets the order right: "Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't think about it."

The story does not teach the script. It shows the script working once, on a moment a toddler recognizes, and hands it over.

What you can do

• Put a real hourglass, or a one-minute sand timer, where conflicts happen. Flip it before you say anything. The child watches the sand instead of your face.
• Practice the three sentences when nobody is upset. Book 13's read-aloud audio does this as call and response before the story starts.
• When a child says "you copied me," treat it as a feeling report, not an accusation. "It sounds like you feel like something was taken." Then the breath. Then the talk.

The educator guide for Book 13 has a stomp-and-whisper activity for the "mad" feeling and four face cards for the calm-down table. The hourglass costs about as much as the tape.

Sources

• NAEYC topic hub, Guidance and Challenging Behaviors. www.naeyc.org/resources/topics/guidance-and-challenging-behaviors
• NAEYC, Educating Young Children, Spring 2026, "Advice for Guiding Children's Behavior". www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/eyc/spring2026/advice-guiding-childrens-behavior
• California Department of Education, California Preschool/Transitional Kindergarten Learning Foundations: Social and Emotional Development (2024). Original PDF. Archived copy on littlesparksbooks.com (PDF), saved in case the original moves.
• California Department of Education, California Preschool/Transitional Kindergarten Learning Foundations: Approaches to Learning (2024). Original PDF. Archived copy on littlesparksbooks.com (PDF), saved in case the original moves.

Chris Kuczynski is an engineer turned registered patent attorney, a preschool co-founder, and a dad. He is the author of Kit's Little Sparks, a 20-book STEM series that gives children ages 2 to 4 the social and emotional foundations of the inventor's mindset. It is the first of four age-tiered series for readers ages 2 to 12.