Every Student Belongs K-5 Responsibility to Protect
Overview
This lesson utilizes the wordless picture book I Walk With Vanessa: A Story About a Simple Act of Kindness. After a whole-class read-aloud, students divide into groups to create dialogues for specific scenes in the book. The activity encourages students to discuss why people choose different roles in a situation allowing collaborative problem solving and practicing how to care for and protect others. The optional fourth and fifth-grade student extension includes analyzing historical examples and discussing why and how people have failed to protect others and how we can be better allies to those being harmed in our communities today.
K-5 Read Aloud
I Walk With Vanessa: A Story about a Simple Act of Kindness is a wordless picture book. This powerful story is about a girl whose family moves to a new area after the school year has started. Vanessa experiences social isolation, bullying from a boy and finally the intervention of a new friend who bravely chooses to ally with her. The book is more than a simple story of bullying. A careful examination of the illustrations reveal that the girl is Black, the bully is White, and the ally is a student of color. Kerascoët intentionally uses color throughout the book to deepen the conversation about social-emotional environments as well as social justice. Additionally, careful observations can be made about the bully for students to develop a more holistic empathy. The WITS organization observes, “It would be easy to label him ‘the bully,’ but when we first see him, he is also isolated on the playground and looks unhappy too...The book shows what happens when we move from leaving out one child to leaving out another. We solve one problem but create another! The new child is accepted by the other children, but what can be done for the boy who was mean to her?”