From: Ginny Moore Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2001 15:14:58 -0600

Wasn't it great to read about the extent to which the book Uptown resonates with Henrietta Smith's Harlem memories from her childhood?

Remember when Robin Smith told us about reading Uptown to her class? In writing about their responses to this Coretta Scott King winning book in the Illustration category, Robin said, in part, " Children, even in my nearly all-white class of second graders, responded with enthusiasm to Uptown. They really liked the brownstones that looked like chocolate bars, the basketball courts and the flashy Apollo Theater. They were able to see that the boy in the story loved his neighborhood just like they loved theirs..."

I also recently read Uptown to young school children, to thirty kindergartners and first graders with varied racial, cultural & economic backgrounds. I said that when Mr. Collier wrote and created art to illustrate Uptown, he was thinking about Harlem, a real NYC neighborhood today, one with a very important history for African Americans. Although none of the children seemed to have any familiarity or knowledge of Harlem, it was clear that they enjoyed hearing what Bryan Collier wrote. They also responded enthusiastically to his artwork. Although I wasn't reading Uptown in order to teach about Harlem or for any other specific curricular purpose, I noticed that the children's informal "small talk" with each other afterwards seemed to be about their own neighborhoods.

It seems that Uptown has a specific young audience for whom Harlem is real, or Harlem might be a real experience or memory of someone important to some of them. The book also seems to have a wider young audience. In its specificity, it genuinely evokes the theme of Community. - Ginny

Ginny Moore Kruse gmkruse at education.wisc.edu Cooperative Children's Book Center www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/ A Library of the School of Education, University of Wisconsin Madison
Received on Thu 15 Feb 2001 03:14:58 PM CST