Lookin Look Me written by Walter Dean Myers and illustrated by Christopher Myers is a colorful artist story about a young African American boy life through rhythm. The story starts with Jeremy looking in the mirror and seeing a handsome dude. As the book continues Jeremy sisters, brother, father, teachers, and community is shown through his eyes and is introduced in rhythms. Some themes that can be found in this book is Self-love, self-worth, family, and community. ( )

Summary: Looking Like Me is about a young African American boy from Harlem named Jeremy looking at himself in the mirror. As he looks in the mirror he talks about different aspects of who "Jeremy" is- little brother, son, writer, city child, artist, dancer, runner, dreamer, and many more.

Personal Connection: I liked that this text was told in poetic verse with the repeated "bam" to each person who talked about a different aspect of who Jeremy is. I also loved the illustrations- the layered affect of the images is really interesting to look at. This is also a text that includes people of color- which is important to have in the classroom for all students to see themselves in texts!

Extras:
-Meet the author: https://www.teachingbooks.net/author_collection.cgi?id=37&mid=62
-Interview about process/books: https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/walter-dean-myers-...

Application to Teaching: This book works well in a unit on being yourself/being kind to others. It would also work well to teach about adjectives or describing words, and how we are all many different "people" that make us who we are- could work well with "the best part of me" project. Also great for pointing out speech, multimodal text, and the layered photographs/artwork! ( )

There are a few reasons why I liked this book. The first reason is for its pictures and illustrations. They are fantastic. A lot of the pictures in the book are actual photography. And to add another feature, they added a hand drawling to the real photograph. It really gives it a surreal point of view. It makes it feel like it is real and that this story is true. It used a bunch of different colors that are eye-popping and creative. The pictures go great with the text too. But, they do not help really to tell the story. They are there for show. The other reason why I liked this book was because of its moral to it. The moral is that people around him in his community know him and they are all one. They feed off of each other and help each other out. They help each others self-esteem because they know each other and it makes them feel as if they are one big family. Giving the fist bump is a vote of confidence for Jeremy. It is a motivator and a positive gesture that every community needs to embrace. ( )

This book illustrates that a person can be multiple things and people are complex. It also has a nice rhyme to the words written on its pages. Along with repeating the word "BAM!" every time something good happens. Plus, the illustrations in this book are beautiful and well designed.

I liked this book for two reasons. The first reason being the incredible, overlapping illustrations done by Christopher Myers. Myers has taken different images and cut outs of people’s silhouettes and transformed them to create an interesting interpretation of this story about a family told by a young boy. Myers uses positive and negative space when overlapping the silhouettes of the characters with the photographs that he places in the background. The illustrations are also very abstract and may frighten children that are on the younger side. For instance on page eleven, there are four heads that are connected by the mouth and necks to create a sort of square. This could be confusing for younger children. The second reason I enjoyed this book was for the way the author told the story in a poetic manner. Most would assume that a story that focuses on self esteem would choose to tell the story in an old fashioned way, just telling a story from the point of view of a person who has low self esteem. However, Myers chose to have the narrator of the story feel good about the way he looks and used words that rhymed to make the story catchy and enjoyable. The main message of the story is taking the time to look in a mirror at yourself and genuinely like what you see. ( )