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| Sara Marker, ODEC President |
Ever since ODEC discussed #Diversity in a recent research-to-practice newsletter, I am always on the lookout for more picture books featuring characters and situations that differ from my childhood and family. I now make it a priority of mine to stop by the new children's book area at my local Columbus library with the purpose of looking for more diverse authors, characters, and situations. I wanted to take a moment and share about two books I checked out in the last week!
Be Who You Are by Todd Parr (Author of The Family Book)
I found that Todd Parr promoted his new book in a YouTube video. I am excited that you get to have a chance to listen to this title online right now in its entirety! In summary, this book encourages readers to be proud of and embrace differences in age, color, language, learning ability, home life, family, expression and creativity! Take a moment and watch! It is a delightful story for young children with very colorful, engaging illustrations that will encourage positive interactions and discussions!
The second book I wanted to share about is titled Still a Family by Brenda Reeves Sturgis, illustrated by Jo-Shin Lee. It is about a family that includes a mom, dad and daughter who are homeless. Written in the young daughter's perspective, she describes what it is like to live, sleep and play in a shelter and eat at the soup kitchen. Throughout the story, the little girl continuously highlights that her family is still a family and they eat, play and celebrate as a family even though they live in different shelters. It is a great book to use to introduce the topic of homelessness because of its simple text and few lines on each page. Children want to see themselves in the books that they look through, listen to and read. The author also includes a resource page at the end with several organizations listed, such as the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the National Coalition for the Homeless, to assist readers in learning more about this topic and what they can do to help or be helped.
Here is a small preview of this story and more about this author and title can be found here.
