It was the first day of school for our teaching team, who collectively had 25 years of first days of school. It wasn’t new to us, yet we were both coming off of leadership roles that made the day feel new. Amanda Lautenbach (the second author) had been a music specialist for Preschool of the Arts (PSA) for six years, and Mickey Willis (the first author) had been a curriculum developer at the school for the last four years. Now, we were back in a classroom full-time with 16 4- and 5-year olds.  

PSA is a Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool in Madison, Wisconsin. As part of our practice, we view the curriculum as a delicate, intentional, and spontaneous dance among teachers, children, families, and the environment. For several years, our school has made an intentional and organized effort to educate, implement, and practice anti-bias education using a variety of resources to inform our work with children. These include the anti-bias education approach shared in NAEYC resources. 

In both of our previous classroom teaching experiences, we used children’s literature as a provocation for learning. As we came together as a team, we recognized this as a shared value. Through conversations and reflections about the upcoming school year, the two of us formed a shared vision for a yearlong curriculum focus that would combine our dedication to anti-bias education and children’s literature. In this article, we share how we incorporated identity and diversity, the first two goals of anti-bias education (Derman-Sparks & Edwards, with Goins 2020), through the use of high-quality children’s literature to affirm children’s identities. We leaned into two central principles of the Reggio Emilia approach—curriculum as negotiated and families as partners—to ensure that the exploration was authentic and meaningful.  

Our Favorite Day of the Year 

Beautiful, high-quality children’s literature is a passion we both share. It was crucial for us to choose a book that would allow for a deep, long-term focus that mirrored the children in our classroom while opening doors to new experiences (Bishop 1990). The recent implementation of a schoolwide holiday policy inspired by the book Celebrate! An Anti-Bias Guide to Including Holidays in Early Childhood, by Julie Bisson, paired with a strong desire to involve our classroom families in our project work led us to begin our journey with the book Our Favorite Day of the Year, by A.E. Ali and illustrated by Rahele Jomepour Bell.  

Our Favorite Day of the Year follows a class’s journey of getting to know one another throughout their time together at school. It focuses on learning about and honoring differences and inspiring family participation as families share holidays and celebrations that are important to them. We began the year by reading this book to children each day for at least a week before reading it to families at our back-to-school night. The book inspired us to create a classroom sign-up sheet that would invite families and other home caregivers to pick a date to share about the holidays or celebrations that reflected their values and family cultures. We committed to opening our classroom to families and allowing them to take over when it was their time to share. Again, drawing inspiration from Our Favorite Day of the Year, we suggested that families could share authentic artifacts, books, or activities that represented their traditions.  

When learning about holidays and traditions from cultures that were not our own, we relied on having open conversations with families to ensure that we were holding ourselves accountable and appropriately representing and appreciating their important day. Knowing that some families didn’t have the flexibility to come into our setting, we welcomed other avenues for them to represent their traditions. 

Be You! 

While we waited for families to sign up to share their favorite days, we decided to take the lead and celebrate something we all knew was important: ourselves! We used books such as Chrysanthemum, by Kevin Henkes, and The Name Jar, by Yangsook Choi, that allowed children not only to focus on the academic elements of learning their names, but also on social and emotional elements. These included having pride in themselves and appreciating differences in others. When reading books with names or words that were not in our primary language, we relied on YouTube and other forms of digital media. Because we know the importance of hearing your name pronounced correctly, we diligently looked for a read aloud by either the book’s author or someone who was a native speaker of the language of the book.  

Broadening our celebration to include ourselves also opened the door to other rich children’s literature. One book that became a class favorite was Be You!, by Peter H. Reynolds. This book creates a joyful celebration of individuality and staying true to Y-O-U! With each new book we introduced, it was like a twirl or dip in our curriculum dance.  

The use of these books in our class was simple, yet impactful. We would read them at least once a day, every day, during our morning meetings or our end-of-day check-ins. As a way to keep the children engaged with the repetition, we invited them to notice something different in the story each time we read it—maybe a new word or a detail in the illustrations. This really increased engagement and opened a lot of discussion. We began to get great insight into each child’s individual interests and personalities through this celebration of self. We were beginning to feel the music of our yearlong curriculum collaboration with the children.  

We soon shifted our focus to learning about and observing national and international holidays that reflected children’s interests (like creating observational drawings of our cats on Global Cat Day). This allowed us to keep the dance music on, if you will. We relied heavily on the National Day Calendar (n.d.) as a framework for these investigations, and we incorporated quality children’s literature and media where we could. National Polka Dot Day was a class favorite as we introduced artist Yayoi Kusama through the book Yayoi Kusama: From Here to Infinity!, by Sarah Suzuki and illustrated by Ellen Weinstein. We enhanced this experience by using online video clips to virtually explore one of Kusama’s installations, Obliteration Room at the Tate Museum in London. This inspired us to use white paper and polka dot stickers to turn our loft into our own “obliteration room.”  

We documented each celebration on a giant calendar in our hallway, which was inspired by the teacher’s gift at the end of Our Favorite Day of the Year. This calendar generated a buzz of excitement throughout the school as we reminisced and looked forward to upcoming special days. Colleagues and even families from other classrooms began sharing their own resources and ideas with us to guide our celebrations. Our documentation served as an invitation for others to join the rhythm of our project.  

Seeing examples of how we celebrated in big and little ways helped our families become more comfortable in sharing their own practices and traditions. Our first family-led sharing about a celebration focused on their alternative to traditional Thanksgiving celebrations: instead of eating turkey on Thanksgiving, they went for a walk through the woods looking for turkeys! This tradition enriched our curriculum as the family shared a presentation about turkey facts and created a scavenger hunt for the class to use during our own outdoor walk.  

Soon, we noticed the children coming up with personalized celebrations, like “National Amy Becomes a Big Sister Day” or “National Mickey Comes Back from Vacation Day.” They also began offering ideas for celebrating our hundredth day of school, like “a cake that says 100” and finding 100 “beautiful things.” The children were beginning to take the lead in our dance. 

What Do You Do with an Idea? 

By spring, we began conversations with the children about taking the lead on planning a “grand finale,” or end-of-year celebration. Throughout the year, we had discussed the difference between big and little celebrations and ways we learned about or celebrated them. We thought about their birthdays, where there might be a special song or a treat that made it a big celebration. Conversely, on holidays such as National Oreo Day, we simply took time to appreciate the people and/or things we loved. Knowing we wanted our grand finale to be a big celebration, we guided the children to start thinking about things that are often a part of them. We took their ideas and grouped them into the following categories:

• music 
• gifts 
• invitations 
• food 
• activities/games 
• decorations 

Using these ideas, we created committees of small work groups for children to discuss, reflect, plan, and prepare for their big celebration.  

But what were we celebrating exactly? The children said, “We’re celebrating getting bigger!” and “That I remembered to write all the Es” in my name!” Of course we used another children’s book to guide our discussions: What Do You Do With an Idea?, by Kobi Yamada and illustrated by Mae Besom, invited us to think about the possibilities for the event.  

What the children created was uniquely theirs, complete with face paint, cereal (inspired by a poll we took on National Cereal Day), and even a song called “I Love Copper Room,” sung to the tune of Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll.” Ultimately, we had an idea, the children danced with it, and it became a beautifully choreographed culmination of all of our accomplishments and celebrations.

Literature as an Invitation to Learning: Final Thoughts 

Developing a yearlong curriculum based on children’s literature was a new and rewarding practice for us. We noticed the children’s deep personal connection to the literature as we repeatedly read each book:  

• Be You! became intertwined with almost every element of the classroom. When children followed along with a peer’s idea that could possibly end in a poor choice, we used language from the book to remind them to “be your own thinker!” Families became connected to the literature and would put notes in their children’s lunch boxes quoting the book, signing their notes “Be you!” Children could identify the words in various contexts, such as when a student wore a shirt to school that said, “Be You!” 
• Our Favorite Day of the Year allowed us to have a guided, open-minded, and focused curriculum that led to investigations and invitations that were personally connected to the children and families in our class. It invited a year of finding joy and connection. The children named days like “National Ms. Amanda Gets Married Day” and “National Aaron Finds Out He’s Going to Have a Baby Sister Day,” showing that they understood the importance of celebrating others’ life events. This brought our class together in a way that was deeply meaningful.  
• And finally, What Do You Do With An Idea? brought all of our investigations together into a big idea that the children were proud to share with their families and friends. 

We have considered relaunching the investigation with a new group of children, again using Our Favorite Day of the Year. We are curious to see how the makeup of the new class will change the curriculum and what we create together. What we do know for sure is that there is always something to learn and to celebrate.  

Photographs courtesy of the authors
Copyright © 2024 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. See Permissions and Reprints online at NAEYC.org/resources/permissions.

References

Bishop, R.S. 1990. “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom 6 (3): ix–xi. 

Derman-Sparks, L., & J.O. Edwards, with C.M. Goins. 2020. Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves. 2nd ed. NAEYC. 

National Day Calendar. n.d. “Year at a Glance.” Accessed October 2023–April 2024.  nationaldaycalendar.com/year-at-a-glance.