We Are Here (An All Because You Matter Book)

Great book, love the author and the message

This is a great book for kids!

Pleasant book, encouraging. Idk how compelling it will be for repeated reading, it's kind of unstructured if that makes any sense. Glad we read it though

My grandkids love reading this book

There are so many things I love about this treasure of a book. Bryan Collier's illustrations are spectacular and engaging and author Tami Charles is a master with language. Her poem that makes up the text of this book contains creative language, alliteration, and metaphor. It is essentially a spoken word poem that comes to life in the form of this book. While this is a wonderful book to simply read to children, especially children of color, to encourage them to persevere in life, it is so much more. While this book is listed for pre-schoolers, I could see this book being instrumental in a unit on black history for older elementary children. It documents the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual nature of black Americans and highlights a few of their contributions in so many fields. Near the back is a page titled Historic Figures and Contributions in We are Here that is a snapshot of SOME of the historic content of this book. However, I would challenge older elementary students to find more. For example one line of the text alludes to the Woolworth sit-in: " the . . . ones who sat to take a stand." I would also love to see this book performed as "spoken word" in class. So much to enjoy and use in this book! Highly recommended for the elementary classroom.