Brown Girl Dreaming

Brown Girl Dreaming is a memoir about Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, that tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse.  Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.  The poems in this book are extremely vivid, touching and powerful.  Even being about a young brown girl, this book can be used to teach any young girl to live their life, follows their dreams, and shoot for the stars.  In my personal opinion, this book is a strong read due to the fact that it is extremely emotionally charged and well balanced throughout its entirety.  Other novels written by this author are Each Kindness and Another Brooklyn.

Classroom Activities:

1.) Have students write a poem that strongly correlates to their personal life and where they think they should be in life or if they feel they are on the right path in their life to get to where they would like to go.  After students have written the poems, ask if they wish to share with their class and then allow students to choose if they would like to create a poetry book for their class and possibly send in to be published.

2.) Students can choose a poem from the book that they feel either relates to the or they really like and the students can create a project based on that poem.  They can create a short story or a short film and present to the class and even possibly send to Jaqueline Woodson herself.

Goals:

• Allow students to find a path in their life that works best to get them to where they truly wish to be.
• Helps students understand that having a weakness and pointing it out is the first step to finding out how to turn that weakness into a stregnth.

Bibliography:

Woodson, J. (2014). Brown girl dreaming. New York: Puffin Books.