Black and Brown Are Beautiful: Day 1
/In conjunction with Black History month, we kicked off our annual Black and Brown are Beautiful project today! This is a project my former co-teachers and I adapted from our colleague, Kara Hinderlie. Kara teaches young elementary children at Irvington Elementary in NE Portland. A number of years ago, inspired by the book Black is Beautiful, by Ann McGovern, Kara created in multi-leveled inquiry project into noticing and developing the vocabulary around the beauty of black and brown, then folding those observations into focusing on the beauty of black and brown people. She uses the poem and photo book My People, by Langston Hughes (photos by Charles R. Smith, Jr.) to get her students thinking. From there she speaks to melanin, ancestry, human geography etc.
So with Kara’s blessing we created a preschool level multi-leveled project. Today we began by inviting friends to observe, paint, create, and touch beautiful black and brown objects and photos. At circle we listened to children reading Ann McGovern’s book (I’ll share the link), while looking at the pages.
In addition, we invited friends to read and observe books speaking to all of the beautiful black and brown skin tones we see. Throughout the day we read, The Colors of Us, by Karen Katz, The Skin You Live In, by Michael Tyler and David Lee Csicsko and also observed stunning artwork by Amy Sherald, Bisa Butler, and Kehinde Wiley. This week we will also read My People, by Langston Hughes.
We’ll continue as today this week and gradually come to learn more about the science and ancestry of skin color. Katie Kissinger’s book, All the Colors We Are: The Story of How We Get Our Skin Color will play a part in these discoveries.
As we progress with the project we will work on mixing the color of our skin tones and creating much art.
