Multicultural Children's Picturebooks

 

Sakamoto's Swim Club

I just finished the picturebook Sakamoto's Swim Club by Julie Abery (#@juliedawnabery) and Chris Sasaki told in rhyme with interesting vocabulary (toil, poised) and phrases (tensions knock at Europe's door) inspired by a science teacher from Maui and the children he trained to be Olympic swimmers. After witnessing them swim in the sugar plantation irrigation ditches, he applied his knowledge of science and passion to lead the children into a swim team that inspired the world. A true story I had no knowledge of. What a beautiful example of perseverance, dedication, and dreaming big. Access and opportunity to learn how to swim requires some resources not always attainable. The dream to swim might begin running through a sprinkler in one's front yard, splashing through a city fire hydrant, or a swimming the current in a ditch surrounded by sugar cane and migrant workers.

This book is appropriate for readers K-8. A model for a strong setting lead

   Valley Isle.

    Lush terrain.

    Migrant Workers

    cutting cane. 

Weave into Social Studies, Habits of Work, Athletes, Sports, and Hawaii learning. The illustrations are gorgeous. The colors, the details, the perspective of the characters and their views shown. Full bleeds and vignettes weave throughout in a fluent yet flexible manner. From the placement of the text, colors applied, the movement the lines offer, each page allows for a pause.

I like the idea of gathering text sets of many children's books with global and multicultural narratives about the same sport. Swimming is a sport I have begun to gather, and this gem, Sakamoto's Swim Club is one I will be adding to the text set-serving as a informational picturebook among the fiction favorites and diverse company of Get Set! Swim! by Jeannine Atkins & Hector Viveros Lee,  Jabari Jumps by Gaia Cornwall, Saturday is Swimming Day by Hyewon Yum and Julian Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love.

 

Kids need Access to Hear My Voice

 

 

17 different Mexican and Mexican-American illustrators contributed to the beautiful artwork in, The Testimonies of Children Detained at the Southern Border of the United States: Hear My Voice compiled by Warren Binford for Project Amplify. After reading this my first thought was if this was a narrative case study dissertation, it would be an incredible one. The words in the text poetic, supporting their illustration like a balanced ecosystem. Weaving several diverse narratives, voices, and styles, offered me a front row seat to children experiencing immigration detention. A tough hard truth through the portal of the picturebook that will make your heart scream and your spine ache. At the same time, a feeling of power comes form knowing what you learn in this picturebook. Looking closer and revisiting is necessary.
 

The double spread full-bleed of the children with a different species of a bird as their head (with the bird represented the Country the "child" was from) had me pause for many long moments. Such strong symbolism how the children within the cages were as diverse as the various Countries they represented. An opportunity to think about what we know, don't know, and how we can do better.

 

After reading Hear My Voice, I thought of the work by Jairo Buitrago and just how powerful children's picturebooks are in terms of current events that are so horrific they feel like they are part of a dark resolved history, not the current unresolved traumas of some humans living in today.  These are the books that must be on every school library shelf. The books our teachers of history, current events, and ethics should share and engage in rigorous discourse about. 

 

The incredible strength in children telling the story of a difficult experience lends itself to children's responses that unearth their perceptions and allow them to better understand issues around migration, human rights, and racism. Readers will appreciate some of the suggested questions in the back, such as, "Can you think of reasons why people might leave their home?" or "Do you know what rights are?" as a way to prompt for children's responses to their transaction with this picturebook.

 

I would recommend building a text set that included Jairo Buitrago #@jjairobuitrago and Rafael Yockteng's books too.

 

 

 

Dreamers by Yurt Morales

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

LULU and the Hunger Monster

 

Erik Talkin, illustrated by Sheryl Murray, free spirit Publishing, 2020.

Ted Talk with author Erik Talkin

The Influence of LULU and the Hunger Monster

 "With a GRIND and a CLANK, our old van slows to a stop." This is a powerful lead. With my research around first graders understanding of economic inequality, they have talked about the need of a car to get to work, "You need a car to get to work so you are not poor." First graders expressed, "Being poor means you don't have a lot of food or the things you like to eat." This picturebook lead nurtures their understandings of the indeed correlation between these two things. This is why books like this must be read in our classrooms and homes. 

The Influence of Children’s Literature 

    Children develop understandings and perceptions from picturebooks. In research looking at children’s literature as a catalyst to deeper thinking, Laminack and Kelly (2019) emphasized that, “Young children are active agents as they construct understanding of themselves and the world around them” (p.132). Words and illustrations invite children to deepen curiosities and expand their own view of the world. Readers demonstrate critical thinking with their responses to picture books, and in those responses, they can reveal the influence picture books have on their ideological assumptions. Children’s literature is highly influential, as this reflects social norms and cements the reader’s interpretations of their culture, values and beliefs, while acknowledging what stereotypes are the loudest. Bishop reasoned:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however a window can also be a mirror. (1990, as cited by Harris, 2007, p.153).

The experience of reading is a powerful portal to thinking. It helps translate meaning of the world as this serves as an ingredient to children’s deepening understanding. 

    I read on, "All Mom's money goes to fix the van. She needs it to drive to work. That means there's no money left for groceries." I sit with this line a moment. These words help cement the correlation. This makes sense, this is an idea that can nurture critical thinking and add to the reader's economic inequality schema. If more first graders had access to a narrative like this, would they grow up to be adults that blamed the individual for their economic situation, or would they be the individuals looking for systemic changes? If we listen closer to how our children respond and talk about picturebooks like this, we will hear the answer to that important question!