Whoever You Are

Mem Fox

The children’s picture book Whoever You Are is written by Mem Fox and illustrated by Leslie Staub. The target audience for this book is 1-2 grade for both boys and girls.

-Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Stars

-Summary: This book explains diversity and the difference among people found in the world. Despite differences, everyone shares common interests and characteristics. Similarities include love, happiness, and pain.

Diversity is a hard topic to explain to young children and a hard concept to understand but this book does a great job explaining that everyone is different in their own unique way but everyone can come together through similar attributes. I like the book because it is not too wordy, it is short and to the point written in a way that is easy for children to understand. As a younger child I felt that diversity was not explained to me at a young age and I found myself wondering why people looked and acted differently from me. This book is geared toward young elementary school students so that they can easily understand that people differ all over the world. It also does a great job relating to the things that are the same between people such as love, pain, blood, and feelings. The illustrations also go wonderfully along with the text.  The illustrations depict all different types of races, physical appearances, and landscapes among both boys and girls. They are drawn in a very elementary way where the pictures use a lot of color but not too much detail. The shapes are also very basic. The illustrations are done with oil.

This book can be used in a classroom to teach diversity to students. Many different cultures and types of people are shown throughout the book so every student can identify along with it. The book can lead into a discussion about different cultures and having students explain what type of culture they come from. It can give students an understanding and an appreciation of different cultures and understand cultural acceptance. Students can draw their own pictures of their culture or they can do a writing assignment explaining their ethnicities. This does not only have to relate to culture but it can also be differences that appear in everyday life such as the way people dress, talk, think, personal interests, etc. As a teacher, it is important to tie back to the idea that every though there are differences between people, many people also experience the same things throughout life as well. As for literary devices in stories this book can be used to explain repetition since many of the same phrases and formats occur throughout the entire story.