Books like Nana Akua Goes to School
By Tricia Elam Walker
For the kid who feels a flutter of nerves before show-and-tell, especially when what they're sharing makes their family different from everyone else's. Tender, reassuring, and rooted in family pride.
A rhyming, day-in-the-life look at a school where kids from every background arrive, share their traditions and talents, and are welcomed exactly as they are.
A spider artist longs to spin beautiful webs and one true masterpiece, but is shooed from room to room of Beekman's Boardinghouse until she finally finds a home that welcomes her gift.
A girl dreads joining the special education class at her new school, nicknamed the junkyard, until her teacher Mrs. Peterson helps her see her odd, brilliant classmates for who they really are.
A boy named Dennis expresses everything through mime — silent, expressive, entirely his own way — until loneliness gives way to friendship when he meets a girl named Joy.
A poem-portrait of one family — brown-skinned mama, white-skinned daddy, and their two children — celebrates every skin tone between them as simply, joyfully theirs.
When a crocodile egg rolls into her nest, Mother Duck simply hatches it with the rest and raises the little crocodile as one of her own ducklings.
Across generations, the women in one family pass down the art of quilting — from a seven-year-old girl sold away from her parents who sewed secret maps to freedom, to daughters who carried her knowledge through segregation and into the fight for literacy.
A Puerto Rican girl grows up surrounded by love and pride in her Taíno and African heritage, but painful treatment from the world slowly dims her sense of her own beauty — until her community rallies to wake her up again.
In a town where wooden people stick gold stars on the talented and gray dots on the ordinary, a dot-covered Wemmick named Punchinello visits his woodcarver Eli to learn where his worth truly comes from.
An introduction to gender identity for young readers, explaining that some people are boys, some are girls, and some are both, neither, or somewhere in between.
A king adopts a family of orphans, who each try to win his approval with gifts and displays of talent — until one simply chooses to spend time with him instead.
