Rhyming Prompt: December 20
In all of our reading I’ve noticed a trend;
The characters drawn are all differently penned.
When I look quite closely at people in books
I notice that humans don’t have all the same looks.
Let’s go read a book that celebrates
The ways we are different—I value the traits
That make us unique, and the ways we’re the same.
We can draw our own pictures; it’ll be a fun game.
Download the prompts for December 17-20 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).
A close-up image of the December 20 prompt. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border and a gold wax impression of a frog. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.
Other Materials:
Crayons in realistic skin tones, paper, and at least one age-appropriate book with protagonists who are not white, heteronormative, cisgender, able-bodied, etc. Race/sexuality/gender identity or expression/disability does not need to be the theme of the story.
Suggested Pose:
Frantz is sitting on a pile of art books. I thought that for this activity, it could be fun to see how various artists have handled representation.
Frantz is sitting on top of a pile of art books holding the prompt for the day.
Activity:
Read the book with your child. As you read it, ask them questions about the characters. I find this short video from Jemar Tisby to offer some great examples for how to use the lens of fiction to frame early conversations about race and identity with children. Once you’ve read the story, have your children practice drawing the book’s characters.
Rationale:
This is designed to build on yesterday’s activity, where we began chatting about intersecting axes of identity. Today, you’ll want to chat a bit with your kids about race, using the frame of the story to do so. You have likely had these conversations already, but I find this guide from PBS to be a helpful resource. If you’re hoping to get into some more detailed conversations about race and racial justice, this list from the Center for Racial Justice in Education has a wealth of resources. And, if you’re just fully overwhelmed by this topic and don’t know where to start, this guide from Parents tells you exactly how to begin to approach the issue depending on your child’s age.
My family is fish-belly white, and we live in an extremely homogenous region, so my main goal today is to continue the process of helping my children realize that people have a wide array of appearances. For so much of my lifetime, whiteness has been invisible because it has been coded as the norm. The hope is that as white people like me become increasingly aware that our culture is a racial construct that has been used to other BIPOC, we will stop assuming we get to set culture’s terms. My family reads a lot of books starring diverse characters, but I’m hoping that by drawing those characters, my kids will be better equipped not to think of whiteness as a neutral default. My kids’ art is currently quite abstract, so I don’t anticipate their drawings will resemble the art on the page, but the benefit is in the practice.
Book Recommendation:
Oh, so many! My family’s favorite is We’re Different, We’re the Same by Bobbi Kates and Joe Mathieu for its simplicity. I also love Malcolm Little by Ilyasah Shabazz and Ag Ford for slightly older picture-book readers. I love this entire list from Embrace Race on great picture books for 2020, too.
An image of the cover of We’re Different, We’re the Same by Bobbi Kates and Joe Mathieu.