​The NYC region is the ancestral home of the Canarsie, Lanape, and Wappinger peoples. Today and every day, it is important to learn about and honor Native history and celebrate Native heroes - past and present - with your kids.
 
Here are seven beautiful children’s books written by and about Indigenous people. Many of these books are illustrated by Indigenous artists as well. Enjoy!

1. When We Are Kind by Monique Gray Smith
   ​A book about the many ways to be kind – and how it makes us feel.
2. We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga by Traci Sorell
   This book highlights a full Cherokee year of celebrations and traditions.
3. Thanku: Poems of Gratitude, illustrated by Marlena Myles, edited by Miranda Paul
   A book of poems about gratitude, including illustrations and many poem by Indigenous peoples.
4. You Hold Me Up by Monique Gray Smith
   This picture book explores all the ways that we can show love and respect for one another.
5. Hungry Johnny by Cheryl Minnema, illustrated by Wesley Ballinger
   A story about a hungry child and Ojibwe community and celebration.
6. Thanks to the Animals by Allen Sockabasin
   A young boy gets lost as his family travels to their winter home, and kind animals come to keep him safe and warm.
7. Giving Thanks: A Native American Good Morning Message by Chief Jake Swamp, illustrated by Erwin Printup, Jr.
   A children’s version of the Thanksgiving address, written by a contemporary Mohawk chief.
8. And a bonus: this article (for caregivers) is an honest account of the myths of the first Thanksgiving, as told by a member of the Wampanoag tribe.

​Special thanks to Debbie Reese's comprehensive blog about American Indian portrayal in children's books, which is an excellent resource. Debbie is Nambé Pueblo.

Questions? Need support with registration? Shoot us an email and we'll be happy to help out.

In February of 2020, our biggest COVID-related problem was the unreasonable price of hand sanitizer. A small bottle of Purell, if you could find it, cost as much as a month of Netflix. We hadn’t budgeted for that. 

In March of 2020, we had to pay a much steeper price. The pandemic shut down cost us our hellos and hugs. It cost us our routines, our morning coffee, our social lives. It cost us our mental health and our inner peace. We had not emotionally budgeted for this.

For millions of us, it would end up costing jobs and income, housing, entire support systems. For millions more, it would cost the lives of friends and family members, more than any war in our collective memory.

Compared to many, my March was not so bad. But I wouldn’t call it easy.
Here is what a mashed up day in March 2020 looked like for me. 

Friday, March 13th, 7:00 am
I’m loading up the car to head out to a small Pre-K program in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, for one of our Pre-K in-school field trips. It’s Water Unit time in NYC and we’re going to do some hands-on exploring. We’ve got a large sensory tub, cups, toy boats, food coloring -- the works.

Today, I pack extra dish soap to put into the shared water tub, and disinfectant spray and wipes to clean every material between uses. 

On any other day, there would usually be 15-20 children in the class; on this day, only nine kids are in attendance. Parents have started pulling them out of school.  

We are scheduled to return the following week for another session, and 18 more at various schools over the next three months. We never get there. This is our last Pre-K Workshop of 2020. ​

Flashback: Thursday, March 12th, 11:00 am
I get an email from a family in one of our afterschool programs saying they are going to keep their child home for a few weeks. This is the first email of this kind that I’ve gotten -- surprising in retrospect, but also indicative of how badly we needed and expected our support systems to stay in place. I wonder if the mom who emailed might be a little overly anxious, but I understand. The WHO declared the virus a pandemic yesterday, after all.

Flashback: Wednesday, March 11th, 1:00 pm
Staff meeting before afterschool. I remind my staff again of our new COVID guidelines: practice the handwashing song with the kids, encourage distance, no activities that put them face to face, Purell constantly, Lysol everything (remember when we thought it was mostly transmitted through infected surfaces?). We are planning for the unexpected and unknown.

Looking back, we didn’t spend much time discussing what might happen because there wasn’t much time to discuss it. It was, maybe, going to be bad, we thought. Then, within what felt like a matter of days, it wasn’t a maybe, and it was worse than bad. ​

​Florpsday, March 87th, 2:20 pm
The only way I can tell one day from another now is by which class we are offering on Zoom.

Afterschool would be kicking into gear now. Unpacking supplies during snack at some schools, picking up students from classrooms at other schools. 

There was no game plan for this, no road map, no best practices; no one had shut down for a worldwide pandemic in this country before in our lifetimes. We are operating on instinct and hope, and hope is getting harder to come by. The main directive is keeping everyone safe, both physically and emotionally. What could we do to help our students feel how much we cared, even though we didn’t have a chance to say goodbye?

How do we help our students understand and adapt to this when we are having such a hard time?

Higglepiggleday, March 94th, 3:30 pm
I hop on Zoom. Our first week of classes on Zoom, we had 12, 15, 17 kids in every class because everyone was so eager to see each other. It was a new fun thing, to see your friends’ faces on the computer. But the newness wore off and the frustration set in.

In every in-person program, we worked to create an environment where kids felt safe and had fun, had opportunities to learn at every turn, and there were plenty of teachers around to go to for individual help or assurance.

Now, we are more like Teacher TV. We have to project an environment into their homes from our screens. We have lost the opportunity to have one-to-one conversations and private check-ins with individual children. 

We’re 10 inches tall, and the kids control the volume. 

Still Higglepiggleday, 4:00 pm
Conducting classes over Zoom is like holding classes in the dark, or through a wall, or from a city block away. “Are you there, Leni? Myles, can you hear us? I thought I heard a voice; was somebody trying to tell us something? Raegan, we can’t see you, you disappeared! Oh no, I think we lost Sam!” 

Still Higglepiggleday (every day now is Higglepiggleday), 4:25 pm
Class on Zoom is ending and I hop in again to say goodbye. I’m happy to see familiar faces, but I’m reminded again of all the kids who aren’t on screen. Not every family we work with has reliable internet access, or enough tech devices in the house for their five-year-old to use one to Zoom in to a dance class while parents work (or need the device outside the home) and older siblings attend school and do homework remotely. Not every family we work with has the mental and emotional bandwidth to set their child up for a science class while they spend their days in high-risk work environments, or worrying about how to cover bills. Not every family is sure where they are going to be in a month. 

Flashback: Sunday, March 15th, 5:00 pm
I am at my parents’ house. They have live TV and I’m glued to the news. Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carranza appear and declare that schools will be shut down, effective tomorrow. They are scheduled to reopen on April 20th, 2020 - but five whole weeks seems like an eternity to be out of school.

LOVE these things! Use them a million ways:

• Draw attention to all the different parts of our bodies (particularly faces) that we use to show emotion - whether we realize it or not.
• Make an expressive face showing an emotion, and ask the kids try to copy it with their emotion faces.
• Adjust your emotion face to show a feeling and ask the kids to guess what emotion the face is showing.
• Ask the kids to copy each other's expressive faces on their emotion faces. 
• Give kids small mirrors and ask them to copy their own expressive faces.
• Ask the children to show feelings on their emotions face, then draw those faces on a separate piece of paper and label them with the appropriate emotion.
• Use during story time - "who can show me on the emotion face how you think the bunny is feeling?"
• Once the children are used to them, incorporate them into self-regulation and problem-solving
  • "Can you show me on the emotions face how you are feeling/how you think your friend feels/how you would feel if... "
  • or "I notice that your face looks like the angry face [display on emotions face]. Did I read your face correctly; is that how you are feeling? How can we help you feel like this face [display happy emotions face]?"​

And many more. But before you can use them, we need to make them....

Get Ready to Craft!

Assemble:

• Face and Feature Template (download below)
• Scissors
• Hole punch
• Crayons/markers for decorating face
• Brass fasteners
• Base material: cardboard, cardstock, paper plates, or other. See below.

If you plan to make one face durable enough for the whole class to play with, go with cardboard - cut out cardboard to glue the paper face and features onto. 
​
If you're making several faces, I say skip the cardboard in favor of cheap paper plates. We love to have the kids each make their own Emotions Face, so our execution doesn’t need to be highly durable so much as highly do-able in repetition. 

Ok.... it's also because more pliable materials reduce scissor fatigue - or whatever it’s called when you’ve been cutting out so many things, or cutting such hard-to-cut things, that the shape of the scissor handle becomes permanently imprinted around the base of your thumb….

Paper Plate Edition...

Social skills, and emotional intelligence, are vital for getting a job, forming and maintaining friendships, finding a spouse, just about any human interaction. And tens of thousands of teachers incorporate this learning more formally into their class. Yet somehow many larger-scale curricula still seem to view social-emotional learning as a side benefit of being in a classroom, and spending time around other children. And that’s part of it! But that’s not all of it. ​

Some ways to use this printable: 

• Tape up the pages in the dramatic play area for reference during play
• Pin up the pages in a "problem-solving corner"
• Cut out the images (laminate first if you wish) and let a small group of children (1-4) lay out the images on a table or rug and try to match together the images of similar emotions. 
• Now try to sort the images into pairs of opposites
• How else can you sort them?

Kids like playing on a glowing rectangle? They’ll love a light table!
Splurge on this one. Or DIY this one with an underbed storage box, tissue paper, and christmas or outdoor lights; thanks to our friends at Tinkerlab for the DIY inspiration! And the possible activities? Limitless... check out the Pinterest page of the wonderful Teach Preschool among others, for several dozen ideas to start you off.

Kids like visuals with depth and color? They’ll love an illuminated globe!
Look at this globe, kids!  The light inside goes on and off! It spins! That's fun, right, kids?

Eventually I stop Ack-ing and I remind myself of a few things:

1) “Lazier” body doesn’t equal lazier mind. My planning may involve visiting fewer locations or fewer in person conversations - and a lot more sitting on my butt in front of a machine - but the fact that there’s less movement required from my body (oh, my poor fingers, so much scrolling!) doesn’t mean my brain isn’t operating at full speed.
And it’s not all sedentary! I may not have to carry stacks of books, but early ed will always be about hands-on learning, and those bags of manipulatives and project materials don’t get any lighter or less bulky! I basically always look like a crazy bag lady…

​2) These online tools are modern versions of resources available to our foreteachers (the word is growing on me). They went to school; we go to school. They experimented and gained experienced. Us too. They went to the library; we research too, just not as much with paperback books. They talked to other teachers; we still exchange ideas, we may just never meet each other in person.  Lord knows we still put in plenty of hours preparing! 

3) Sometimes perhaps I should just shush and be grateful. No, on Amazon I can’t feel the materials before I buy, and yes, I may be missing out on ideas from the good people at Michael’s, and I feel a little guilty for not patronizing local businesses…but for variety and convenience, and midnight shopping, Amazon Prime makes me feel like a lucky duck.

4) A webpage can’t teach my class. No one’s coming up with entire lesson plans for me. I find brilliant ideas on Pinterest (or other awesome blogs!) but it’s inevitable that I will tweak them in one way or another to best apply them in my particular classroom. My students engage in the lesson when I prepare and present it in an engaging way.

5) The kids are the point of all this. Wherever the ideas come from, the end result is my students get a joyous, creative, and effective education.

Dedicated to some of my favorite foreteachers: Mrs. Flannigan (Denise Flannigan, Kindergarten) and Mrs. Nabby (Joan Nabatoff, preschool)

Looking for some joyous, creative, and effective enrichment for your early ed class? Learn more about our pre-k workshops here.

Thanks for reading! Ever doubt yourself? Or have advice for those who do? Leave a comment by clicking on the blue "Comments" link at the very bottom or very top of the post.