Two Books, One Real Permission Slip
This is the week stop asking your students to be good at something before they're allowed to start it. Two books land in the same stretch this September, I Love My Hair and International Dot Day, and once I put them next to each other, I realized they're teaching the exact same lesson from two completely different angles.
Why I stopped rushing past the messy part
I Love My Hair, by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley, follows a girl named Keyana through the everyday, unglamorous work of getting her hair detangled and styled. It would be easy to treat that part of the story as the thing to get through on the way to the pretty ending. Her mother doesn't do that. She stays in the process, and she uses it to help Keyana see her hair as versatile, beautiful, and tied to something larger than a single school morning, her culture, her heritage, her own sense of self.
That's the real vocabulary this book hands students, culture, heritage, tradition, creativity, expression, perseverance, legacy, empower. Not vocabulary in the flashcard sense. Words they get to actually use to talk about themselves.
A dot that refuses to be about talent
International Dot Day, September 15, is built on The Dot, a picture book about a girl who's convinced she can't draw. Her teacher doesn't ask her to get better first. She asks for one thing, make a mark and sign it. That single dot becomes the whole story, and by the end, the same girl is helping another student do the exact same thing.
Neither book asks a child to arrive already capable. Both of them say the beginning counts, messy, unfinished, and real.
What I do with the pairing
Monday, I open on I Love My Hair, straight through, no interrupting. After, students name one thing about themselves that took someone else's patience to help them see clearly, the way Keyana's mother helped her. Tuesday, we shift to The Dot for International Dot Day. Every student makes one mark, on paper, and signs it, no rules about what it has to become yet.
By the end of the two days, the class has built a small, shared understanding without me lecturing them into it. You don't have to be finished to belong here. You don't have to be talented to start.
What this changes
The students who usually hang back during a new activity, the ones who wait to see how it's "supposed" to look before they try, are the ones this pairing reaches the most. One student told me she used to ask her mom to straighten her hair before school pictures every year, until we read I Love My Hair together. She kept her curls that year and told the whole class why, without me asking her to. That's not a coincidence. That's what happens when a room spends a week saying the in-between version of you is allowed to be seen.
If you want this built for you
The I Love My Hair Companion Guide and the International Dot Day Companion are both ready, story maps, vocabulary with visuals, comprehension tied to the real turning points in each story, and the Make Your Mark Dot Art Craftivity that gives Dot Day something students actually hold onto, not just talk about.
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See You In the Next Chapter
