Why Multicultural Children’s Books Matter in the Classroom

Children’s books are an important part of any classroom. They are a great way to engage your students and help them learn new things. The best books are those that can be used for multiple purposes, allowing teachers to tailor their lessons to meet a students’ needs. Multicultural children’s books are often multi-purposed. For instance, the book Have You Thanked an Inventor Today is not only an excellent Black History Month Book, as it centers on Black inventors; it’s also a wonderful STEM book that can be shared with students on any given school day. In fact, when it comes to multicultural children’s books, there are many benefits they can offer your classroom.

For example:

• Multicultural children’s books can help students learn about other cultures. Introductions to other cultures through books help children to become more open-minded and accepting of people from different backgrounds.
• If your classroom is composed of diverse students, multicultural children’s books can help ensure that all of your students see themselves reflected in characters while reading. This heightens self-awareness and self-assurance among students who might otherwise feel isolated or left out of the literature that they read. It also promotes tolerance and understanding in the classroom.
• Multicultural children’s books encourage critical thinking skills. When you introduce multicultural literature into your classroom, students may have to analyze the story from another’s perspective. This might help them to better understand their own emotions and those of others around them.
• Multicultural children’s books promote empathy, compassion and respect among students who may not otherwise have had much exposure to other cultures or ethnicities. When students read stories about people from different backgrounds or with different experiences than their own, it can help them understand how other people might feel about certain situations.
• Multicultural stories can also help kids see that there is more than one way to live life as an American citizen — which fosters the idea that America is the cultural melting pot of the world!
• Multicultural children’s books allow teachers to have a wider range of reading materials for their students to read. This gives students more selective options when it comes to choosing a book that they can enjoy.
• Multicultural stories also allow teachers to expand their understanding of the world around them. This is a major key when it comes to teaching children from diverse backgrounds.

Children’s books are an important part of our culture. They influence children’s lives in a big way as they are often a child’s first introduction to an outside world. Fortunately, more and more books are being made to include diverse characters.

If you’re looking for books to incorporate into your classroom library that adhere to Common Core standards and can be used to supplement curriculum, check out the selection here! Each book is STEM and/or Social Emotional Learning related and features diverse characters!