Your Name is a Song: Learning Names in Your Community

Children’s books can teach us ALL to welcome. What is more welcoming than pronouncing names correctly?

The Beautiful Blackbird Children’s Book Festival brings you a video read aloud and companion activity that teaches us to both sing and dance our names. The two videos are great icebreakers for cross-cultural meetings. The songs that result become perfect triggers to remember new names.

READ ALOUD VIDEO
In the picture book read aloud of Your Name is a Song by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow, a child is frustrated by a day full of teachers and classmates mispronouncing her beautiful name. She tells her mother she never wants to go back to school. In response, the girl’s mother teaches her about the musicality of African, Asian, Black-American, Latinx, and Middle Eastern names on their lyrical walk home through the city. The Beautiful Blackbird Children’s Book Festival read aloud contains the sounds of that city and songs of each of the featured names.

ACTIVITY
What is the music in your name? What is your song? What is the song of people in your community? The Alliance Theater leads a short workshop on how to weave the consonants, vowels, syllables, and accents of a name into song. Some may want to express their name with dance and the Alliance Theater has those moves! Watch, wonder, and try these icebreaker and memory triggers in your community!

MORE BOOKS
For more books that represent our New Arrival and New American communities, visit the welcoming nonprofit I’m Your Neighbor Books. For other Beautiful Blackbird Children’s Book Festival offerings on the immigrant experience, look for Joseph’s Big Ride and The Red Pencil.