New Perspective

Since it has officially been over a year since I taught second grade, and since it has been officially stated that next year I am teaching fourth again (which is what I wanted), I decided that it was time to clean the second grade storage room that is supposed to be a guestroom (not that we have many guests that stay the night... but considering there is currently no walking space in there at all... it should be cleaner).

One of the big things filling the room is children's books. It was (and still is) a huge priority for my classroom to have tons of books. However, my 4th graders for the most part won't read the books I had for my second graders. I kept some... but most were being stored for the chance of teaching a younger grade again sometime in the future, and for our kids.

So I started sorting into two main piles- books to keep for classroom and for when our child is older, and books that will be great for the 1-4 year old that joins our house sometime in the future. Mostly it was keeping the easy, simple books with lots of pictures or good lessons (like its okay to be sad). But amongst my searching I found a few books that I really liked as kids books... but now that we are adopting seem totally inappropriate!

The first one is more well known- Are You my Mother?. Simple enough story, the baby bird searching for its mom, asks a whole lot of other creatures and things, while each tells the bird they aren't their mom because they are a dog, cat etc. At the end, baby bird finds mom, and is told she is his mother. Nice story... unless you are adopting a child that looks different than you. I think that the book seems to be telling the child that the correct mom needs to be the one that looks like you, and I don't really want to say that to my future African child.

The next story I discovered during my teaching time: Stellaluna. I used to read this to my second graders when we were learning about animals. For those of you who haven't read it, the basic storyline is that the baby bat gets separated from mom and is more or less adopted by a bird family. This bat learns to eat and fly like the bird brothers and sisters it is living with, but keeps wanting to do things different (like not eat bugs and hang upside down). Time goes on, and baby bat meets back up with mom! She teaches baby bat how to be a bat, and do bat things, etc. The bat tries to teach her bird friends the same things, but they all find that they are better being who they are. To most kids, I would say that the general message is to accept who you are even if you are different than the others around you. Good message. Now, as a future adoptive parent, I wouldn't read this book to my child. Consider the implications- separation from mom, and live with a new family, so far it really identifies with their life. If it ended with bat staying with bird family and all being happy together, maybe we would be fine... but no. After living with new family, mom returns, and the baby goes back to live with mom! Then, finds out that life is better that way.

Adopted kids frequently have fears that their birth parent will come and take them away from the family they are attaching to. Also, the message that we want to send is that they are supposed to be with us, even though we don't look the same. Stellaluna is the opposite of that.

I could go on, there are various other ones, but these two stuck out the most. It isn't even that I think they are bad books, or that no one should read them, it was more of gaining a new perspective of how thing will look through my child's eyes, and trying to get a head start on at least at first protecting them from books that send the wrong message. As my kids get older, I will probably be more open with what I read to them, and then we can talk about how the book isn't accurate, or how it is a different story than us, etc. But when our child is first home... these books are in storage.