This is a stunningly illustrated version of Amanda Gorman's Change Sings, which features a young Black girl bringing musical instruments to members of her community, including reaching out to the poor and homeless, elderly and disabled, and in the process lifting them up and strengthening their community bonds.
Teaching Resources:
There is a plethora of free teaching resources for this book that make it easy to incorporate into your Social Studies or English classrooms, across all grades.
The publisher offers an excellent, 12-page free Educator's Guide, with themes, essential questions, discussion questions, ideas for exploring more about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for 3rd/4th grades, studying rhymes with 1st/2nd grades, understanding activism and protesting.
The guide also, in a considerable change for a picture book teaching guide, offers middle and high school teaching ideas, which is just outstanding! I used picture books with a Civil Rights unit with my 8th graders, and it is an excellent way to quickly build background knowledge and open discussions. Older kids, many of whom haven't picked up a picture book in years, absolutely love picture books as a quick anticipatory set, or a perfunctory dive into areas of interest.
The guide offers questions on social justice, poverty and homelessness, hunger, intolerance, disability and access, and recommends pairing Gorman's other two books of poetry, Call Us What We Carry and The Hill We Climb, with several other picture books.
You can get additional, downloadable resources for your classroom through the book at Penguin Educator's Portal for the book, including 4 sample pages from the book, a downloadable oversized poster for kids to write on, and 6 activities, including: a word scramble, a coloring page, a fill-in-the-blank with a few verses, and a blank drawing / coloring page.
Learning to Give posts a lesson that includes before, during, and after-reading discussion questions and offers six classroom activities.
The NEA offers several ideas for sharing this book, five discussion questions, and a list of additional resources for further study.
In addition, Teachers pay Teachers offers many pay-for-teaching resources on this book.
