Educations Matters: Diverse Children's Book Reviews
History, social science and geography for kids.
I learned about Raksha Bandhan from Rajani LaRocca’s Storytelling Math picture book, Bracelets for Bina’s Brothers. We used her picture book for the August 2021 Multicultural Children’s Book Club. I also learned about Raksha Bandhan from my friend, Vaibhav Yadav, who trained at my boxing gym. He’s India’s Unified Welterweight boxing champion, a.k.a. the…
The New Orleans Holocaust Memorial Sculpture is an artistic visual prayer in memory of the Six Million Jews of Europe and those millions of other victims who were tortured and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators from 1933-1945. The sculpture is composed of nine panels, each with different designs. As you view the scupture…
I’m half Japanese American but I’ve never celebrated Hinamatsuri, known as Girls’ Day or Doll’s Day, in Japan. It is celebrated on March 3 every year with a display of dolls representing the Heian court in a celebration to celebrate girls and wish for their continued good health and happiness. An expansive hinadan in Katsuura,…
“If the plantation owners of the South, Jackson’s people, were to have the land they wanted to grow more cotton, the Choctaws had to move,” I said. “And if you, Chief Pushmataha, were so against this move, you must be gone, out of the way.” from When A Ghost Talks, Listen by Tim Tingle …
2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark case that made mixed-race marriages legal. It’s hard to imagine that mixed-race marriages were illegal until quite recently. What is the outcome of making mixed-race marriages legal? Anti-miscegenation laws or miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by…
What amazes me the most is that I grew up in Seal Beach, California, one town over from Westminster, where Sylvia Mendez and Aki Munemitsu both lived. When Aki and her family were forced to leave their farm during WWII and live incarcerated at internment camps, a banker helped her family lease their land so…
“This history was totally hidden from white children. And that was deliberate.” from The Atlantic I think that the Tulsa Race Massacre may have garnered a single sentence in my history book when I studied A.P. History in high school in Southern California. A single sentence or even paragraph isn’t enough to do it justice,…