Nana Akua Goes to School

Summary

It is “Grandparents Day” at school for Zura. Zura is anxious about this because her grandmother is different from the others. Her grandmother is from Ghana, South Africa. Not only is her grandmother from a different country, but she also has unique markings on her face, which is an old tradition in her culture that demonstrated which group you belonged to. Nana Akua presents a lesson about her culture using a quilt, which in the end encourages the students in Zura’s class to embrace her culture.

Theme(s):

Courage/bravery, Love, Traditions

Personal Response

Overall, I loved this book. One thing that I noticed that really stood out to me throughout the book was that Nana Akua consistently showed pride in her culture. No matter what feelings Zura had at first, and what the other kids were saying. She remained strong and prideful which was something that I think was very important for Zura to see. As I was reading, the book made me feel sad at first because I could really feel for Zura when she heard things being said about her Nana.

Teaching Ideas

One idea that I have is when I do my Ellis Island unit towards the end of fourth grade, I could do a project similar to what Zura and her class had to do. A really cool idea would be to have students create their own “family” quilt, similar to what Zura’s grandmother did. except instead of the markings on the quilt, students can incorporate various aspects of their own ethnicities to share with the class. They could so create a class quilt, and each student gets to create one piece of the quilt.

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