Read Africa

by Karen Leggett Abouraya

How often do you make a list for the grocery store and then leave the list at home and have to remember what you wrote down?  That is Fatima’s dilemma in Grandma’s List, a Children’s Africana Book Award winner by Portia Dery, illustrated by Toby Newsome. 

Calling Grandma’s List an excellent read-aloud book, Africa Access Review says the illustrations “show a neighborhood in Ghana that is very typical of many African towns with shops, gardens, small livestock, and many people outside working and playing. Children not familiar with West Africa can learn about palm nut soup, groundnuts (peanuts) and Bissap drink.”

Africa Access highlights the best books about Africa especially during its February Read Africa initiative but throughout the year as well.

Fatima has convinced her grandmother she can help with the chores on Grandma’s list of errands – but she loses the list and has to remember all the details, mixing up just about everything.  Contrary to expectations, Fatima’s family is very forgiving and she concludes that being a child isn’t so bad after all.

This is an excellent book for children to study the illustrations:

·       How does the dinner table look the same as yours? Different?

·       What about the village scene – what looks familiar? Can you draw a picture of your neighborhood on a Saturday morning?

·       Have children write their own list of grocery items or household tasks and imagine they lost the list. Ask them to write a paragraph about how they could help themselves remember items without that list.

·       Encourage children to consider the importance of details. Find out about cornflour – the kind Fatima mistakenly purchased – and write a paragraph about how it is used differently from wheat flour. Try to find a Ghanaian recipe using cornflour (usually called cornstarch in the United States).

·       Fatima doesn’t like her nickname “Fati.”  Do you have a nickname you like – or don’t like? Write about your nickname – or a nickname you would like to have.

There are more classroom ideas in the Africa Access Review of Grandma’s List as well as recommended picture books (Anansi Reads) and chapter books (Sankofa Reads), book marks and reviews of Children’s Africana Book Award winners. 

Children and teachers may add their own comments about the books they read at http://africaaccessreview.org/ - which becomes a student writing activity in itself.  It is also possible for students to submit videos or posters about the books they read, write a letter to the author or illustrator and even request a visit from a Read Africa Teaching Artist. 

 The 2018 CABA awards  will be celebrated with a reception on April 5 and a family festival April 6 at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.  

Read Africa

by Karen Leggett Abouraya

It’s almost Read Africa Week – that first week of February when Africa Access encourages everyone to kick off Black History Month with great books about Africa. There are lots of resources and booklists online, including the 2017 Children’s Africana Book Awards.

Let’s look at Chicken in the Kitchen, by Nnedi Okorafor, illustrated by Mehrdokht Amini (Lantana Publishing). Okorafor shares the masquerade culture of West Africa through a young Nigerian girl who fears – then adores – the giant chicken in her kitchen.

·       Ask students to write about someone they didn’t know or someone who scared them (even just a little) who later became a friend (or at least less scary). How did the change happen? How does that affect the way you meet new people now?

Chicken in the Kitchen also provides opportunities to talk about visual literacy. With Instagram stories and Snapchat images, television news and Twitter photos, images can galvanize a nation and even the world.  Are young people learning to interpret, gather information and take meaning effectively from images?

·       What does this image in Chicken in the Kitchen tell the reader about Anyaugo’s community? Here’s what the Africa Access reviewer  noticed. See how many of these observations your students notice.

o   “To the left we see two couples in traditional dress symbolizing gender parity in the production of yams; to the right musicians, also in traditional dress, play local instruments. The backdrop shows a town with houses and apartments rather than a rural setting. The children attending the masquerade sport Western dress and local designs.”

·       How do pictures help tell the story of Anyaugo and the chicken? Notice for example, how the Wood Wit appears in images before being mentioned in the text. How many Wood Wit images can your students find?

o   Ask children to write a letter to the Wood Wit asking for help with a task – and then pretend they are the Wood Wit and write a response. This could be a group project as well.

In my book Hands Around the Library: Protecting Egypt’s Treasured Books (a 2013 CABA winner) and its accompanying website, there are news photos from the 2011 Egyptian revolution that illustrator Susan L. Roth translated into cut-paper collages, adding rich interpretations to the story. 

·       Ask students to choose an interesting news photo or image and re-create it as a drawing, painting or collage. You can also provide random news photos to students and ask them to write a caption or paragraph; then compare their writing to an actual news account of the event in the photo.

Read Africa Week is an opportunity to focus attention on individual countries and stories from a continent many Americans know little about. It is also an opportunity to begin adding these stories to your year-round reading lists – along with attention to the increasing importance of visual literacy.