Something happened in our town
Author: Marianne Celano
Includes an extensive Note to Parents and Caregivers with guidelines for discussing race and racism with children, child-friendly definitions, and sample dialogues. Free, downloadable educator materials (including discussion questions) are available at www.apa.org
Illustrator: Jennifer Zivoin
Narrator from Scribd audiobook: Leslie Green
Genre: Contemporary, Social Movements, picture books
Original publication date: March 2018
Book description: Following a police shooting, two families - one White and one Black - discuss the event, its aftermath, and what they can do to help.
Thoughts:
This is a very straight forward story touching a delicate matter, this is especially relevant at the moment with the Black lives matter, but this subject is not new. One of the most difficult things while raising children is how to try to make your children be accepting and not get clouded with the social misconceptions of today's society.
This story helps open a very good topic. It tries to explain in a very simple thing about social injustice based on race.
This is meant for a very young audience so it is very simple and it is helpful to different ages.
The story is about young children who hear about a police shooting a man they question their parents and we see two families provide the answer with acceptance and give a good answer trying to make the kids realize the current racial injustice one of the families is black and one white. Both provide a very short and simple answer but being very clear that treating people differently based on their race is never good and it should not be acceptable.
The one thing it was also very interesting was the note to parents and caregivers providing an explanation for vocabulary about race-related words, also tris to provide an explanation for several questions children may have from the story.
I really think teachers should be reading this to their kindergarten students, but then again some awful people might overreact and not agree but it is helpful to try to get children to see the racial injustice from an early age, I see no point in hiding that reality from them. We need to make sure they do not follow the same toxic pattern that allows this injustices take place.
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