Shades of People, published in 2009, is a fantastic introduction of the diverse skin tones of people. Typically at around three years of age, children begin to notice that not all people look alike. Because children love to look at other children, this book is a great way to introduce conversation about one major difference - skin tone.
Over fifty photographs of real children of various ethnic backgrounds and in shades ranging from "ivory" to "very dark" adorn the pages of this Scholastic book by Shelley Rotner and Sheila M. Kelly. Children are described as creamy, sandy, copper, cocoa, almond and rose. Because the authors focus on the word shades rather than colors, they evoke the idea that all people belong to the same color scale, but land in different areas of that scale, thus drawing attention to what people have in common as well as their differences.
I love that all the pictures show happy children. Sometimes they are alone or with one or many friends. Sometimes they are with their family members who may or may not be the same shade. The book also includes mixed families and adoptive families to show that you can't even tell about a person's family by merely looking at them.
The authors' comparison of skin to wrapping paper is appropriate for children and really helps my preschoolers understand that skin is just a covering. After reading this book, we hard boiled a brown egg and a white egg. We talked about how they are the same and different on the outside. Then we peeled them both and discussed what we saw on the inside. We had a great discussion about skin as a covering for the inside of the body. That led to questions about how we don't think the same even though our muscles and bones are made the same. It's amazing how even young children understand that although our physical makeup is the same as other human beings' makeup, we have different personalities!
The book mentions places where we are more likely to see a variety of shades of people, such as the beach, the park and especially the city. And of course there are pictures to accompany each place mentioned. The last line reads, "In the world, there's light and dark, and everything in between." This book does a great job of documenting all those shades in photographs and celebrating the differences among people.