I love this book for for many reasons, it's a book children can grasp, they understand the relationship between the color of skin and different foods she relates to our skin. Yet, we are all the same in many ways, we have friends, neighbors, and family we love. We all share feelings, a beating heart, etc. I use this book at the beginning of every school year when we talk about self awareness and building a classroom community. One of the best activities we do is look at each others skin and try to compare it to the foods in the book, then I show them how we all have 4 colors in our skin,( I use the word pigment) but the combination is different for each of us. I use white, red, yellow, and black paint to illustrate what I mean mixing the colors to try and match my skin. I then have the children do the same thing allowing them to experiment with the paints until they have a color they think looks like their skin. Then they paint a paper plate. We later add our hair, eyes, nose, and mouth. These stay in our class the whole year. Love it!
Hi Chris:
ReplyDeleteThank for sharing this idea for supporting social and emotional development. I think this is a great example of taking one activity and extending it into multiple learning domains: from literacy to creative arts, to social/emotional.
Did you save any samples of artwork from the children?
This looks like an awesome book and I will be checking my library to see if they have it. I want to share it with my oldest graddaughter because I remember wondering about different skin colors when I was a very young child. When I started school there were no other children of different color in my school, in my family, or within my community, other than my own. This soon changed and I felt ackward and did not understand these differences at that time. Thank you for sharing this book!
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