The Colors of Us by Karen Katz

In The Colors of Us written and illustrated by Karen Katz, young Lena learns from her artist mother how to mix colors one day, which opens up her perspective on the many colors that exist around her. Initially believing that "brown is brown", she takes a walk and observes that the friends and relatives along the way all have different variations of skin tone.  The story includes comparisons of these tones to things like peanut butter, chocolate, and butterscotch with illustrations that are not only beautiful, but that students can see themselves within. At the end of the story, the seven-year-old main character gets out her paints and creates a piece of artwork that represents all the beautiful colors she observed along her stroll.

As a former primary teacher, I used this book in the first couple weeks as the groundwork was being laid for establishing community with my students. As a part of our hopes and dream process, students would draw self portraits after a read aloud of The Colors of Us. Using the Lakeshore brand People Colors Crayons, students would match the color of their skin to a crayon for the portrait and would write a sentence about the color of their skin, for instance Lydia's skin is the color of cinnamon or Tyriek has skin that is the color of toffee. Students may choose one of the words from the story to describe the color of their skin, or may get creative and choose something entirely different. After these are completed, we bind the pages together and create a class-made book for our classroom library. Students have always loved coming back to this book and talking with their classmates about the beautiful colors of them.