Social Justice in the classroom

One of our assignments this month was to read a children's book to our class that addressed some piece of "social justice".  I started off searching the internet for ideas.  I borrowed books from the library titled One Hen, Stone Soup, What Does Peace Look Like.  I read what some of the others from my master's group were reading The Recess Queen, Moses Goes to a Concert, and The Little Engine That Could.  It's then that I realized instead of searching the internet, I should have been searching my own book shelf.  I read books with social justice lessons in all the time.

I Like Myself, I'm Going to Like Me, Little Quack's New Friend, and Billy Bully are some of the first books I browsed past.


I ended up reading the book Billy Bully A school yard-counting tale by Alvaro and Ana Galan.  The book mentions 10 things that Billy the Bull does to be mean to his classmates.  On each page the amount of friends goes down by one with rhyming text.  While reading the children were using their picture clues to guess what Billy the Bull was doing to be mean.  We discussed how those things mentioned were mean and how we'd feel if that was us.  The children have been practicing rhyming lately and loved that part of the book.  They were very active during the story putting their fingers up and down as we counted to ten and back to zero.  I was excited to see how engaged the children were with so many different "lessons" from this story.

At the end of the story, one child commented that if the bull took that "thing" out of his nose he might be happier.