Read more about this here.Īmazon Prime has a kids’ tv show based on The Snowy Day, and it’s adorable. It’s an important picture book both because of what it represents and simply because it’s a beautiful, sweet book. It caused a lot of controversy at the time, but now it’s a beloved classic. Published in 1962, The Snowy Day was the first children’s book featuring a child of color (specifically African American) as the main character.
If you don’t love reading out loud, you can watch a fantastic reading of the book here! Note: These ideas are ideal for early elementary students, but even older kids might enjoy the art project and the videos. We’ve read this story dozens of times, but this time we paused and dove a little deeper. When it snowed recently, we read The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats, and it inspired some fun, informal learning. That means if you click on my link and buy something, I will earn a small commission from the advertiser at no additional cost to you. The books we read and what I learned from them stuck with me and created a rich foundation for my entire life.Ī good quality picture book can teach us so much – even if the book is about something simple, like a child playing in the snow. I learned this first with Five-in-a-Row (when my mom used it and I was the student), and now I use it with my own kids. It’s not that a literature for children of color doesn’t exist it’s that so much of the extant literature is lacking in the essential quality that makes literature for children so extraordinary a form: imagination.Something I learned early in my own homeschooling days was how a single picture book can cover many subjects.
Well-meaning acquaintances regularly forward me lists of great children’s books with black children in them close friends regularly buy me such books, when they come across them. But when I look at the library we’ve built for our kids, I do wish for more books for children that followed Keats’ lead, books that use children who look like mine to capture the magic in the mundane, as the best books for children do. Because what I’ve learned-and what I hear often from other parents of children of color-is that all too often the books that do contain kids who look like mine are, alas, not that fun to read. There are only so many masterpieces out there.
Wishing there were more children’s books like The Snowy Day is a bit like wishing there were more grownup books like Anna Karenina.
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