My Mom and Dad (My Family) (2024)

My Mom and Dad, written by Claudia Harrington, is a children’s picture book highlighting familial cultural differences. While it is does not have any notable awards, the piece was given as a recommendation through the database Epic! The story follows two characters, Lenny (who seems to be of anglo-European descent), and Kan (rhymes with Don who is of Japanese descent). As they befriend one another, Lenny goes over to Kan’s house and discovers the day-in and day-out happenings at Kan’s house while simultaneously learning about how his culture is infused within those routines. With archetypal stereotypes addressed, Lenny discovers an important lesson when spending an afternoon with Kan and his family. I think this is a good book for any reader who is trying to understand cultural differences, and who is also surrounded within a diverse community. Equally, the book sends a positive message to embrace these differences and understand we are actually a lot closer than we think. This book is primarily geared to early readers, specifically within the K-2 range and is a certifiable recommendation for children to understand and embrace the notion of having cultural differences with peers while still being able to get along with them.

Book Title: My Mom and Dad
Author/Illustrator: Claudia Harrington
Reading Level: 2.2
Book Level: LG
Book Summary: When Lenny visits classmate Kan’s home, he discovers Kan comes from a multicultural family.

Bookshelf Mentor Writing Traits:

Idea: Harrington does a good job of supporting her topic throughout the entire text; different cultural families have more in common than one may think. The author supports her topic with her main character Lenny asking questions like "who makes your snack?" Or "who makes dinner?" helps the reader see that Lenny and Kan, although from different cultures, have a similar family dynamic. While Harrington does a good job of correlating the similarities of Lenny and Kan's family, but she keeps true to the uniqueness of the Japanese cultural traditions.

Sentence Fluency: Harrington breaks the rules a bit to create fluency while expressing her voice with words like rhymes-with-Don, yes-o-rama, and abso-posi-lutely. The reader also sees an accent word (CLICK!) frequently throughout the story that helps the reader capture the unique Japanese customs in the story. The accented word clues the reader in that they just read about an important topic supporting sentence.

I believe this would be a fun book to use in class to demonstrate sentence fluency. Students can read this book as a class and then can complete a writing activity where they use an accent word that draws the reader into the story to highlight important details that support the topic of the story. As a class, you can brainstorm different ideas of what words make good accent words. Write each of the suggestions down and have students draw words out of a hat to use in their story. Students can share their writing with the class to demonstrate how they use their accent word.

Summary
Kan, rhymes with Don, is student of the week! Kan's mom is Japanese, and his dad is African American. Lenny visits Kan's house and has so much fun learning about Kan's family traditions. Lenny is introduced to chopsticks. Lenny tries the chopsticks with Kan assuring Lenny that he will get better with some practice. Lenny learns about origami and even participates in a family jam session. This is a fun story that shows you can learn a lot of cool things when you spend time with people who are different than you.

Activity
Tell students to sit in a circle. One at a time, have students share their own family cultures and traditions.

Citation
Harrington, C. (n.d.). My Mom and Dad. New York: ABDO Digital.

Multicultural-literature book #6
This book is about Lenny, a second grader who follows around Kan, a fellow class mate to do a report on him since he is student of the week. Lenny learns different things about Kan and his family. He learns that they take shoes off and wear slippers around the house, use chopsticks, and do origami. They do these things because Kan is part Japanese. Lenny also learns that his dad use to play in a band, and even though they are Japanese, they do like to eat American food such as BBQ,. Lenny realizes that Kan's family really isn't so different from his own.

A story of a boy named Kan and his friend Lenny. Kan has a Japanese mom and a Black dad, so when Lenny goes to Kan's house for the first time he has a lot of questions. For example, when they get to Kan's house they take off their shoes and put on slippers because it's part of Japanese culture. The boys spend their time together talking about Kan's culture and Lenny takes pictures of some of the things that happen, to hang them up. A sweet story about friends and their differences in culture.

Nice story about a multicultural family, but that's kind of it. It's nice. It has a nice message, with nice illustrations, and nice kids who learn nice things from each other. It's fine. There is just so much better out there.

Good stories in this series...not too heavy, and addresses diversity in families.

For a class project a boy visits his friends mixed race family and learns about the families customs. Elementary and up

Different culture families

It’s an interesting concept for a series - introducing various types of families and cultures through a school reporter who is interviewing the student of the week.