Pistes d'exploration

Talk about the girl’s search for beauty. Compare her environment to your own.

Write about something in your life that you find beautiful.

Make a list of things that people think are beautiful. Do you agree with all of them?

Walk around your school or immediate neighbourhood. How could you make it more beautiful? Make written plans in your journal as to what you could do. Compare plans with a friend.

In what environments might it be difficult to find something beautiful? Where does this girl find beautiful things? What career might the girl choose when she grows up?

Make a class poster with suggestions for making your classroom a beautiful place.

Read the Author’s Note at the back. Write her a letter to tell her about something beautiful you have received.

Chocolate Me!, The Colors of Us, Mattland, The Magic Beads

Mots-clés

Picture book , city life , community , diversity , hope , making a difference , poverty , resilience , responsibility

Commentaire descriptif

A young girl is disturbed by the dismal sights around her neighbourhood: trash and broken bottles strewn across the courtyard, the word “Die” scrawled in graffiti on the door of her apartment building, a homeless woman sleeping in a box on the sidewalk. Then she learns the word “beautiful” at school and embarks on a search for the beauty in her surroundings, which she finds in the most unexpected—and ordinary—places: a grilled fish sandwich from the diner, a friend’s toy, a shiny apple at the market. Beautiful, she discovers, is “something that when you have it, your heart is happy.” Detailed full-bleed colour illustrations help make this deceptively simple read-aloud an effective resource for raising children’s awareness about the social issues of poverty and homelessness, as well as about the beauty to be discovered even in unlikely places. In a final note at the end, the author shares her own childhood story about her search for “something beautiful.”