These themes will vary! It could be based off of some book mail I just received, pop culture, something personal to me, a headline from the news, a trend I noticed when I was buying books for my library system, etc. I hope you stick around to see all the themes and book recs I come up with!
Today’s Theme: Happy Black Children’s Book Week!
For every small thing my little does or is about to do, I try to find them a book that we can read together and sit and discuss what’s about to happen or why we celebrate it. The only criteria? For it to be someone that looks like them (or as close as possible) or to be about animals or something instead. I take great care in curating their library and making sure that they see themselves represented in books. As a librarian mom I’m very intentional on what I’m choosing to fill our home library with. With so much happening and people trying to remove history, my little will know the truth. It starts with me and their library. So here’s some of the most recent ones I got for them and what we talked about. For Valentine’s Day we read Where There is Love: A Story of African Proverbs by Shauntay Grant. This book talks about love between family and the African proverbs in which they can help show that love. The illustrations in this? OMG like 100 out of 10. I loved this one so much!
I also bought them Fish Fry Friday by Winsome Bingham. We are Catholic and are celebrating Lent right now. This book isn’t about Lent, more so just about a family gathering, but I thought it could work just the same. We refrain from eating meat on Fridays during this season and seeing them also eating fish on Fridays was a good way to get them excited about learning more about Lent and the season. They’re still on the younger side so we only talked about the basics, like this is a “practice” season that will lead us to Easter and how we’ll be “giving up meat on Fridays for a little while” and we will eat fish like they do here. This book is about a girl and her grandmother who go fishing and bring their catches back to fry them up and eat them with the rest of their family. And although we don’t go fishing, we do have Fish Fry Fridays with the entire family during this season, so he recognized that part too. This is one of the things I love about picture books, you can pull lessons and thoughts from them in so many different ways.
Illustrators: Where There is Love (Letícia Moreno) & Fish Fry Friday (C. G. Esperanza) **Also check out the book list I made for work featuring Black Kid Joy in picture books!
Well, there you go! Here I’m just going to talk about why I grouped these two books together. I hope you enjoyed a look at this small part of the books. For a full synopsis of the book or to add it to your TBR, click the picture and it will take you to their Storygraph. The link on the caption will take you to it’s Goodreads.
Ideas for Later Celebrations
For Black History Month I got them Fight for the Right to Read: Samuel Wilbert Tucker and the 1939 Sit-Down Strike for Library Reading Equality by Jeff Gottesfeld. Anything that was about a library I got it lol I also got them I’m So Happy You’re Here by Mychal Threets for National Library Lovers Month. For Earth Day I’m thinking of What the Garden Tells Me by Monica Mikai. For Autism Acceptance Month I’m thinking of A Day With no Words by Tiffany Hammond. (They have a cousin who is autistic.) And for Mother’s Day I got them As You Are by Kimberly Gordon Biddle.
So yes, around here we read Black during Black History Month, during Black Children’s Book Week, and ALL YEAR LONG, for ALL AGES, IN ALL GENRES!
What about you? Have you read any of these? Will you read them now? Have you heard of any of these? Let me know in the comments!