Different is Beautiful Emergent Reader to Celebrate Diversity -

As educators, one of our main jobs besides teaching to the state standards is making everyone feel welcome in our classrooms. Welcomed, appreciated, and celebrated. One of the easiest ways to do that is to celebrate our differences. We can and should teach our students that our differences are not only okay, they’re beautiful.

To celebrate our students’ diversity, we have to intentionally give our students opportunities to celebrate each others’ cultures, heritages, and skin colors.

We also celebrate our differences by reading books that feature characters with different skin colors like these books and we can offer multicultural and diverse teaching tools in our classrooms like these.

We can of course study Martin Luther King, Jr. in our classrooms with books and with creative writing and crafts.

For our young learners, we use our Holidays Around the World bundle as a fun and simple way to introduce kids to different cultures and traditions.

And we can use this interactive Different is Beautiful Emergent Reader with them to acknowledge and celebrate our different shades of brown skin colors.

We don’t need to wait until Black History Month and Asian-American History Month and Hispanic Heritage Month and Indigenous People’s Day to celebrate our differences. This Different is Beautiful Emergent reader can help teach that message every day.

Click here to see our favorite books celebrating Black characters.

Click here to see our favorite multicultural teaching tools.

Inside You’ll Find:

8 color pages to complete your emergent reader (scroll down to download!)
Each page has two sides to the readers
One interactive page in black and white featuring a girl or a boy character to chose from

Using the Different is Beautiful Emergent Reader

This Different is Beautiful Emergent Reader celebrates our differences. Each page contains one to three simple sentences using sight words and simple vocabulary words so students can follow along and then read independently.

Print a copy for each of your students and staple the books together. For page four, give each student either a boy or girl page for them to fill out.

Students will color in the picture to look like themselves using skin color crayons, colored pencils or markers.

They can circle the word “light,” “medium,” or “dark” to help them fill in the blank word.

When kids color and write in their emergent reader books, it not only introduces them to the material but helps them to feel they have created their own book.

To get this freebie, use the ‘click here to download’ button at the bottom of this page.

There are several ways to use this emergent reader. You can use it as part of your diversity curriculum or All About Me curriculum during guided reading time.

Once you’re done using these in class, this is a great resource for students to bring home and add to their book collection.