In these workshops, we’re getting curious about ourselves and our world. It takes a lot of bravery to share who we are with each other, to talk about our feelings, to admit when we don’t know something or made a mistake. It can even take bravery to ask questions.

Let’s do our best to respect each other’s bravery, identities, and experiences.

Click through the slideshow to read guidelines to help us do that, or click here to watch a video that explains our group agreements.

• Set your ice sphere in the small bowl and set it aside. You’ll get to experiment with it a little more in just a few minutes.
• You can also set the large bowl of water aside.

Let’s get back to playing and experimenting with your ice sphere. Is it starting to melt? How can we get it to melt faster?

Get out your pipette, salt, liquid watercolor, and a cup of water. Move the bowl with your ice sphere onto a tray with edges. Place the salt, liquid watercolor, and cup of water onto the tray.

Program leaders may choose to allow participants to continue melting their ice spheres while listening to the leader and looking up at the screen or materials.

Otherwise, clean up!

Then read through these slides. Fill in the blank spots with your own ideas.

Optional activity:
In this book, we meet a little iceberg who encounters some strange changes.

We’ve compared racism to an iceberg and to smog in the air. Sometimes it’s hard to see the bias and under-the-surface racism all around us, but this story reminds us that there are a lot of invisible natural processes happening all the time – just like water evaporating into the air during the water cycle. Let’s keep listening to, learning from, and believing people who experience bias and racism.

• Have each participant stand on a chair.
• Set a cup on the floor in front of them and give them three ping pong balls.
• The goal of the game is to get all three balls in the cup without having any bounce out.
• Allow each participant to play for one minute, handing balls back to the player as needed – then switch to the next participant.

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out whether something that is said is racist or antiracist. Is it just someone being unkind or rude, or is something being said that is racist? Let’s take a closer look at some examples and learn how to analyze what’s going on.

Take a moment to read through this checklist.

How did that feel? Is this checklist helpful, or unhelpful? Is there something the checklist is missing?

Now you’ll have a chance to look at another example.

Have you met Grace yet? She’s such a vibrant person, full of energy and ideas! You can read and enjoy the whole book, or you can read up through the section that ends where the teacher says, “‘Lots of you want to be Peter Pan, so we’ll have to have auditions next week to choose parts.’ She gave them words to learn.” Once you get to that point in the story, move on to the “Chat about it” section below.

Talk about it with your family.

Let’s take a closer look at one way that racism does harm.

Every human being is a whole person with their own personality and character traits, experiences, likes, dislikes, interests and passions. Racist thinking shrinks people down to a single characteristic – for example the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes or noses. Racist thinking says that this one characteristic is the most important – and sometimes the only important – thing about someone.

Please read this important note:

The purpose of this activity is to help people understand how racism shrinks people down to one characteristic. This activity may be most appropriate for people who identify as white, although there are all sorts of ways to “other” people. We recommend doing this activity within racial affinity groups, or doing the activity at home rather than in a racially mixed group setting. Carefully consider the possibility of harm to BIPOC folks in your group. In addition, think about the children in your group with their unique developmental stages and sensitivities. It may be that this activity would be appropriate later on (or not at all).

We also strongly recommend that if you choose to engage in this activity, you also do the “Identity expander” activity that follows this one.

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1. Fill each square on the printable template using the prompts, or choose your characteristics using a blank cube template. Then cut out, fold, and create the cube with tape or glue (specific directions here).
2. Roll the cube and look at what is on the top square.
3. Ask yourself:
   • What if people thought about and treated me as if this one part of me was the only part that mattered?
   • What if this one part about me was the first thing people noticed about me and felt the need to comment on in some fashion?
   • And what if this one feature or characteristic was judged to be “bad” or something that spoiled my entire identity? Or something that separated me from other people and made me so different that other people felt they couldn’t relate to me?
4. Imagine rolling the cube in different cultural settings. Would your experience of yourself change in different cultures?
5. In the next activity, we will reclaim our wholeness!

But first, what if you’ve realized that you’ve shrunk someone else down to one aspect of themselves – whether because of race, or because of some other difference from you – language, culture, gender, sexuality, or some other way that someone identifies, looks or acts?

It can be painful to face our mistakes.

Be kind to yourself. It takes strength and courage to face our mistakes.

Making these quick decisions about people is a very human tendency. Many of us have grown up in cultures where we learned to shrink people down to one characteristic. At the same time, just because it’s natural, easy, and unconscious (done without us actively choosing to do so) doesn’t make it okay.

Be sure to talk with a grown-up about your feelings. Every human has made mistakes (especially the grown-ups since we’ve had more time to make mistakes).

Be grateful that you’re open to learning and growing. That’s one of the most important things you can do – to realize that you will make more mistakes, and to learn from them.

And take comfort in Maya Angelou’s wise words:

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.“

Maya Angelou

How does it feel to be shrunk down to one aspect of ourselves?

Each of us is a whole, growing, and changing human being with personalities, likes and dislikes, skills, experiences, interests, thoughts, and ideas.

In this activity, you’ll get a chance to expand your identity to reveal a little peek at the whole person you truly are.

1. Cut out the printable template on the solid lines, then fold the narrow sections back and forth like an accordion so that the dotted-line folds are hidden under the two large rectangular flaps.
2. While the paper is folded together, draw your face so that each half of your face is on half of the paper.
3. Open the two halves to reveal the folded accordion of paper. In these sections, write all sorts of things about you – things you like, things you’re good at, your personality or character traits, foods you like.
4. Share your projects with each other if you like.

Read this with your family.

Fill your minds with a new story about blackness.

Let’s make a bird craft and paint it just like Blackbird did in the story!