Cultural Curriculum Chat with Jebeh Edmunds

Season 6 Episode #6 Dreamers Book Review

• Jebeh Edmunds

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In this episode of the Cultural Curriculum Chat podcast, we dive into the heart of storytelling and its impact on education with the beautiful, personal tale Dreamers by Yuyi Morales. I invite you to join me as we unpack this touching story about an immigrant mother and her son as they find their way in a new country. Through their journey, we’ll explore themes of language, literacy, and how libraries become safe havens for learning and personal growth.

Whether you're an educator or someone who values community, this episode offers practical ways to create a classroom environment that embraces every child's dreams and potential. Together, we’ll discuss how stories like Dreamers can inspire real-world change and encourage a love for reading and cultural understanding.

I'll also share my love for diverse books from diverse voices, providing resources through my podcast, YouTube channel, and newsletter to help you bring these important stories into your life and classroom. Let’s work together to celebrate our local libraries and uplift cultural awareness in schools. Thank you for being part of this journey with me – we’re all dreamers.

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Speaker 1:

I have a wonderful book with you all today, folks. It's titled Dreamers by Yuyi Morales, and it captures the extraordinary journey of an immigrant mother and her young son as they navigate the challenges of their new life in a foreign land. Welcome to the Cultural Curriculum Chat podcast and Mrs Edmonds Cultural Corner. I am your host, jeba Edmonds, and we share all things multi-educational and multicultural resources and opportunities for you, viewer and listener, if you are an educator, a community member and a business owner and someone in leadership, to continue to move forward for positive change. And I am so happy you're with me today. We are going to review this book together and I'm going to share with you some really cool tips that you educators and community members can use today. So, dreamers by Yuyi Morales it's beautiful, it's breathtaking. It takes you on this journey of this young mother and her trek to have a better life for her young child, and this is autobiographical, written in the lens of the author and illustrator, so I thought that was a wonderful touch as well. Some really neat things that I loved. In the beginning of the story she talked about her life and how she dreamed about her baby and, of course, together they came, and you see the Spanish words amor, love, amor in it, and it talks about young Yuyi, how she bundled all of her things in her backpack, took all that she had and made that bridge, crossing over into the United States, and she left her heart because she had a relative that was gravely ill, that she needed to see in hoping her baby son would be able to meet that elder before the elder passed. She talked about not understanding, you know, this new world that she walked into with her child. She talks about, and I quote and when we made it to the other side, thirsty, in awe, unable to go back, we became immigrants. And she talks about how she became a migrant migrantes. And they migrated, of course, to a land where they were welcomed with words unlike those of the same words of their ancestors. And that's something I want you educators to talk about with your students is, I wonder, what words she's referring to, what context is she talking about and what were her ancestors? If she crossed the bridge over to the United States, what geographical area was she traveling from? So these are some wonderful questions that you can share. She also talks about where a lot of immigrants can relate in their children that there were so many things that they didn't know, they weren't unable to understand, they were afraid to speak. They made a lot of mistakes, for example, playing in a fountain not knowing that that wasn't okay, and learning along the way. And the neat thing is that I love about this book that she brought her baby with her everywhere she went. They traveled around the country until they found a safe space, and that safe space was the library, a place we had never seen before Improbable, suspicious, and I love how Yuyi puts in these high level vocabulary words have your students look it up and read what it might've meant, so they could see and hear and feel what the main character in the story is referring to.

Speaker 1:

She's seeing all of these titles and books and she was able to borrow these books and read it to her young son and they could dream and imagine together. I love how Yuyi created book covers and I bet these must be her favorite books that inspired her to do this book herself. You could see all kinds of titles. There's some titles here that I would read to my students, like Caps for Sale and Pablo Remembers and Hug. I used to read that book, hug, with my baby Max when he was a baby. It was a beautiful picture book that I remember.

Speaker 1:

She also writes where we didn't need to speak, we only needed to trust and a lot of our books readers and educators. There are so many books that are books that don't have text, but you trust the author in the illust in the book to guide you through the story, and I loved that, because a lot of immigrants that are coming to this country go to the library as a safe space. They go there to learn the English language, they go into getting those context clues of looking and deciphering picture books and stories, and they're bringing their children, too to learn alongside them. That's something I really want you to reiterate with your students. Not all of us are born English speakers. Not all of us have the financial ability to buy a bunch of books. That's a luxury a lot of us take for granted, and so I love how she talks about how books became her family language, her home, her life, and how her and her child learn to read together. This book shows you the love of language. This book shows you the love of literacy and how important it is. This book shows you why people like Yuyi have come to this country, dreamt their wildest dreams to come to the United States for a better life, from Liberia, and it also goes to show that they also bring their own stories, their own love of their home language. They also bring their own resilience and their own hope instilling in the lives of their children.

Speaker 1:

I really, really would love for you, educator, to look at her author's notes in the back. She has a whole list of books that have inspired her to make this book. She talks about the different mediums she used to create the illustrations. A lot of it, she says, is the inspiration of Mexican families and in her hometown of Xalapa and her house of where she grew up. So she had a lot of influences from there. And she also talks more about her journey coming to the United States and how she lived.

Speaker 1:

I really want to reiterate, to start this book when you are creating and setting up your classroom community. I want you to use this when you are writing your hopes and dreams for the school year, educators, and this is a great launching pad to get those ideas flowing for your classroom. I really, really want to reiterate the importance of libraries. If we did not have libraries, we wouldn't have an extra community, safe space we would have places where people and community members can have free meetings. There are tutoring sessions going on at the library, there are meetings. There are content creators like yours truly going to the library for a quiet space to write her scripts when her kids are home on a school break. There are so many forums and places and librarians that love to help you, community member, to find that job, archive your family history and the bonus there's lots of books. So I have a special shout out to the Anoka County Library in Minnesota. That was our safe haven for my mom. An educator of 30 plus years would take us Metzger girls every summer to gather up as many books as we could to read in middle school and high school.

Speaker 1:

So I really want you to utilize this book as a launching pad as well of the importance of libraries, the importance of your own classroom library, the importance of your media center in your elementary school buildings, because the more we bring out the fact that libraries are our social justice leaders in our community by having that as a beacon for help, we wouldn't have the UE Morales of the world if we didn't have libraries, and so many other dream makers owe a great debt of gratitude to their local library.

Speaker 1:

So I will have information in the link below of how you can support your local library and how you can give back by being the big dreamer that you are. So if you would like to join us for more creativity and cultural awareness in your school environment, don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter. It is in the link below, where, every week we bring it out, we get lots of resources of previous episodes that I've shared on my podcast and my YouTube channel, so you can, I know, continue and gather up more of your multicultural know-how and knowledge of what I love to share with you all. My favorite thing diverse books from diverse authors, so you can have a more well-rounded knowledge to share with your students in the community at large. Thank you all so very much for joining us today. I look forward to seeing you same time next week. Bye-bye.