On February 22, the activity book, Hues of You turns one!! Stay tuned for fun ways to celebrate. In the meantime, for ❤️Valentine’s Day❤️ here are 22 reasons to LOVE this book.
How will you help children navigate things you aren’t sure of yourself? With children, learning doesn’t always happen with words. Complex concepts can’t be figured out in a single setting. That’s why Hues of You exists. This activity book…
- Allows adults to move past their own discomfort
- Provides caregivers and kids an interactive, engaging, and developmentally-appropriate way to build understanding and appreciation around phenotype, culture, ethnicity and race
- Prompts positive, sensitive, and meaningful conversations about phenotype (skin color, hair type, eye color, origins of ancestors, i.e. what we call ‘race’) and what it all means
- Includes various activities that invite children to think about skin tone and race in an emergent way.
- Supports children’s noticing, wondering, and thinking about something that for adults is fraught with tension
- Allows children to explore ideas through multiple mediums like reading/listening, coloring, writing, asking questions, searching for answers
- Invites children to create portraits of themselves and those they love, craft family trees, imagine what their ancestors may have looked like, and more
- Teaches how/why we have various skin tones, hair textures, and eye color
- Centers children’s experiences in the rich diversity in which they occur – not only Black and White racial categories
- Allows children to learn and re-learn, re-frame, and revise their any negative messages they may have received around devaluing certain phenotypes
- Builds up children by being fearlessly affirming and positive
- Is void of negativity, discomfort, and tension that adults sometimes bring to the subject
- Models for children what it means to look at ourselves and our neighbors and be honoring and appreciative
- Prompts children to embrace our diversity of differences in a way that bonds us as a community
- Distinguishes between skin tone, culture, ethnicity, nationality, and race
- Offers kid-friendly definitions for racism and colorism
- Sets the foundation for helping children learn about and understand that RACE is not biological, i.e. skin tone is not race
- Sets the foundation for helping children learn about and subvert RACISM
- Sets the foundation for helping children learn about and subvert COLORISM
- Gives children permission to subvert oversimplified racial categories to name their own skin tone
- Is created by Lucretia Carter Berry, PhD, who from her background as a professional educator (child psychology, child development, learning theories, antiracism education) and mom in a multi-ethnic/racial family, understands how implicit ideas and associations influence children’s thoughts about themselves and the world
- Is illustrated by then high school artist, Adia Carter, who is now an Art Major at University of North Carolina Greensboro
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