some staff time – the racial literacy + learning hub

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As always, we recommend pre-reading this book before reading it to your children or group.

In this story, Milo and his sister travel by subway train to visit someone special. Along the way, Milo imagines where other people on the train are headed.

Towards the end of the book, it is revealed that Milo’s mother is incarcerated and that Milo and his sister are on their way to visiting her.

In our workshop, we chose to end the story before Milo’s destination was revealed. We were meeting over Zoom, which made conversations difficult, and we felt that we would not be able to give a conversation about incarceration the attention and time it deserved.

We emailed parents and caregivers to let them know why we did not choose to read the whole story and encouraged them to finish the book on their own. We also encourage parents and caregivers to watch the entire fascinating video from illustrator Christian Robinson.

Be sure to check out the Penguin Random House Teacher’s Guide (a free downloadable pdf) with ideas for talking about this topic with children plus tons of other great material.

As leader, you have a couple of options in introducing this project:

You can tell kids that they’ll be making a color-changing slime. Then they can make a more informed choice about the color of thermochromic pigment and food coloring that they choose. Click here to get a better idea of how to choose the colors of the pigment and food coloring to predict the color of the slime when warm and cool.
Or you can have them make the slime and play with it until they discover a change in color. If you want to go this route, make sure that you choose a thermochromic pigment that changes temperature at a lower temperature (70-80 degrees Fahrenheit); otherwise it may take a while for the slime to warm up and you may need to tell the kids regardless.
Or you can tell them that they’ll be making a slime that has a hidden power and ask them to figure out what it is.

Category: some staff time

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