Literacy Journal

If felt nice being back in a kindergarten.  Maybe teaching kindergarten wouldn’t be so bad after all.  Well,  in any case I had an adorable and engaging little buddy, and throughly loved the read aloud.  It will be interesting to see through the formal assessment exercise where her literacy skills are.  While reluctant to write, she had an amazing eyes for the littlest details in the picture book I was reading to her.  She seemed perfectly at home with me and I suspect she is read to at home, perhaps even by a kindly grandfather.  It was interesting the discussion we had on racist, and sexist books and identifying them.  My guess is that some of the classic books that I grew up with and read to my children would fall under this classification.  I would say that some of the  works of Kipling, and colonial India would be considered very racist.  I was heartened to learn from our professor that we can sometimes use these questionable works in the context of when they were written, and to point out the representations that are sometimes portrayed can be hurtful, and unfairly stereotypical.  I often think of fairy tales, and while they are just that, they can possess some really questionable portrayals of people, and a high degree of violence.  Should we stop reading them? I had a discussion with my wife along these lines, she had recently suggested that she would like to see again Disney’s “Song of the South”.  There are a number of racial overtones to this work, as was the book “Little Black Sambo”, which was on my daughters list of favorite reads when she was young, and I never gave it a second thought as to not reading it.  I can certainly understand the sensitivity of certain works being introduced to the classroom, and the multicultural , and racial mixture of a typical classroom today.  I think as children grow older they can better understand the context in which certain works were written, but at these early ages there is so much out there that would not be controversial or disturbing to a child that it is perhaps better to not introduce them into the classroom.