Amazing Grace By Mary Hoffman

Read Aloud Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman 

 This book was extermley cute and fun to listen too! Starting off by looking at the book as a whole the storyline, and what’s being represented in the story, it’s about a little African American girl who loves to act, love hearing/reading stories, and most importantly loves to combine the two by role playing different characters she hears or reads about in the stories. She’s doesn’t limit herself to role playing only female and/or black characters, but uses her imagination to act out characters that are males or have different ethnic backgrounds other than her own.  She’s has so much fun at home imagining herself as all kinds of characters in lots of different scenarios but she becomes discourage slightly when one of her male classmates tells her she cannot play the role of Peter Pan because she’s not a boy and another female class says she can’t be Peter Pan because she is black and Peter Pan is not black. Luckily, her grandma & mom come to the rescue and helps reignite her passion and love of acting by telling Grace she can be anything she wants & her grandmother even takes her to a ballet performance with a black dancer.  Grace tosses aside the negative comments and feelings, and auditions and ends up winning the role of Peter Pan! It was such a cute story, and one that I feel will inspire many children present day. The book offers opportunities to critically reflect on race and racism by the little girl’s narration of how much happiness and joy came from acting and then, after receiving feedback from peers that her race and sex excludes her from a playing a character in a play traditionally casted as a white male, we get to observe Grace become discouraged, and her feelings of confusion, hurt, and doubting herself. I think this book will help students think about the words they choose to say in the classroom and how those words can be harmful. Hopefully it will reinforce the mindset that the students, as peers, should always support one another and build one another up.  I think this book also allows children to explore and critically think about how traditional character roles have been portrayed based on race or sex in the past by other people, but that does not limit the way such characters can be played by other people.  Hopefully students will see that who can portray a particular character should it come down to the person’s love and talent and it shouldn’t be determined y a person’s race and/or sex. The new Ariel movie comes to mind with regards to Amazing Grace book because the mermaid Ariel is a character who was always traditionally portrayed as a white female and now in the new movie she’s portrayed as a black female.  I think it’s really cool and awesome that there are books that do the same thing because it helps encourage people to follow their dreams even if they’re not the “typical look” of the character. The book also addresses antiracism by including multiple different races that are represented throughout the illustrations of the book. I think one learning activity I could do with this book is reflections on thoughts of the book and how we can support one another when people are chasing after their passion/dream. My second idea for a learning activity with this book would have the students actually engage in acting out a story about themselves relating to their own dreams or hobbies. I think it would be a really unique way to get to know each student better by hearing the story of some thing they love to do or some thing that is a part of them just as we got to learn and know Grace and her love of acting.

 

As a teacher, when reading the book out loud, I feel like some of the things that a teacher should just be aware of is that the book does have the girl portray male characters as well as portray a character with a different color of skin. Those are the two comments that were made to Grace as to why she couldn’t play Peter Pan.  A teacher needs to keep in mind that for some kids who may be going through transition or have experienced racism the topics of this book could potentially be a triggering and/or comments made by other students in the classroom could be hurtful. I think as a teacher, it’s really important to lay down the community idea of we are respectful of everyone and we love everyone and just because there are differences in our communities and our home lives does not mean that we are enemies. I feel like reinforcing that classroom value is very important before reading that book.