Since February 2021, the Family IDEA Working Group has been collaborating with members of the Staff IDEA Committee on a monthly community-wide book exploration, selecting a book that aligns with the month’s heritage celebration and developing a discussion guide with questions and activities to distribute to all SWS families. For each month’s book, Ms. Marshall and Ms. Fravel hosted a virtual read-aloud and discussion open to all students. In May, we also added a discussion group for grown-ups to discuss the themes covered and consider ways to approach exploring the book with our children. We also incorporated a question inspired by the book as a reflection prompt for the whole-school community meeting.

 

The goal of these interconnected initiatives is to deepen our individual and collective understandings of a range of heritages and experiences, while cultivating tools to promote inclusion, celebrate diversity, further equity, and develop antiracism. Books provide a powerful window into new worlds, building empathy and appreciation. When we read and discuss the same book together as a community, we expand our collective awareness and begin to develop a shared vocabulary. 

 

By encouraging thoughtful engagement with key themes of the books in many different ways, we support our children’s development of frameworks, skills, and perspectives that will build their capacity to connect across difference. We foster empowerment and activism. We open avenues of conversation around critical topics that lay the foundation for the ways our children will respond to real-life relationships and situations. This is deeply important and transformative work -- and it is a fun and memorable way to connect and spend time with our kids!