Books for Black History Month and Beyond

If you’re looking for more people to study for Black History Month and beyond, I have a couple of book suggestions for you. Young, Gifted and Black and Young, Gifted and Black Too by Jamia Wilson and illustrated by Andrea Pippins each feature 52 Black artists, activists, athletes and more who made their mark on the world.

Each person is described in a brief biography and includes an illustrated portrait. The books are chronological in nature, but the first one focuses a lot more on people from the 20th and 21st centuries and current people readers might already know such as Beyonce and Solange Knowles, Oprah Winfrey, Venus and Serena Williams and Misti Copeland.

The first book covers some of the people you’d expect in a Black history book such as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington Carver, Barack and Michelle Obama and Maya Angelou, but it also includes some lesser-known folks like Brian Lara, a Trinidadian cricket player, and British long-distance runner Mo Farah. You’ll also find profiles of people like Madam C.J. Walker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Muhammad Ali, to name just a few.

The second book goes a bit more into history and includes more people from around the world who aren’t athletes. The book opens with Juan Latino, an Afro-Spainard who was born enslaved, married a Spanish noblewoman (in one of the first legally recognized mixed-race marriages in that country back in the 1500s) and published three books of Latin poetry.

It includes Queen Nanny, who led formerly enslaved Africans in Jamaica; Toussaint L’Ouverture, known as the father of Haiti, which became the first free state founded by formerly enslaved people; Moses and Calvin McKissack, who established the first Black-owned architecture firm in the United States; Albert Luthuli, whose non-violent efforts to end apartheid in South Africa led to him being the first African awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960; godmother of rock ‘n’ roll Sister Rosetta Tharpe; Gladys Mae West, whose computer programs helped in the development of GPS; and British fashion designer Ozwald Boateng to name a few.

More well-known names are also included in the second volume such as Coretta Scott King, Prince, Laverne Cox, Naomi Osaka and Amanda Gorman.

These books are colorful and dun to look at and to read and would make a great jumping off point for further research and reports about these figures from Black history.

About the books: each book is 64 pages long and hardcover. The first was published in 2018 and the second in 2023 by Wide Eyed Books. Suggested retail is $23.99 for the first and $24.99 for the second.

Black History Month Collaborative Quilt Project

Black History Month Puzzle Pieces

Black History Bingo Cards

I don’t know why Pinterest just suddenly decided I needed to see all the content about task cards and task boxes for kids, but these ideas are great for the classroom to keep in centers or have on hand for early finishers. You can also use them at home as quiet bags or boxes for kids to use when younger siblings might be sleeping, or in the car for a non-screen activity.

Let’s take a look at some fine motor skill task cards and how you can use them to teach kids skills while they play.

Pre-K Pages has a nice set of playdough task cards you can use in boxes or bags with a little tray (or they can just work on the table if they are sitting at a table). Working with clay or play dough is a great fine motor skill exercise, or you can add these to your playdough center if you have one to give them a little bit of direction while they work.

Teaching Mama has a bunch of great ideas for fine motor task boxes, from practicing working a glue bottle to threading beads, using clothespins or scissors, dropping water, finger painting and more. There’s a free printable that shows all the task options she talks through in the post if you want to make your own little boxes, or just keep these ideas on hand when you’re ready to add some fine motor fun to your days.

One of the ideas she mentions in that post is working with a hole punch, and Early Learning Ideas has a whole bunch (the urge to write “hole bunch” is strong) of ideas for printables that help kids practice hole punching, whether it’s a strip with circles on it for them to punch or pictures that include circles for punching, these ideas make it a little more fun to practice this important skill.

My Happy Place Teaching has a whole post about using fine motor task boxes in kindergarten, and her paid resource includes more than 100 task ideas with printables. But if you don’t need 100 boxes you can still get some good ideas from this post about different tasks to include and why and when you can use them. She also mentions using them in the morning while you’re busy with kids coming in at different times, which is a great idea.

Have you read?

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