Age-Appropriate Anti-Racism Resources for 5-Year-Olds: What I Actually Use As a Teacher and Mom
The graham cracker was halfway to my 5-year-old Leo’s mouth when he said it, crumbs already dusting the cuff of his faded dinosaur hoodie. “Mama? Ty said Jamal’s skin looks like dirt. Is that true?”
I’ve taught pre-kindergarten for eight years. I’ve sat through every mandatory district diversity training, sent home curated book lists to hundreds of parents, and can recite the official script for talking about difference with young kids in my sleep. But leaning against my own kitchen counter after school, goldfish crackers spilled across the placemat, all that training went out the window. I mumbled something about melanin, how skin gets its color from something in our bodies the same way eyes are brown or blue, and he nodded, took another bite, and ran off to build block towers. That night, after he was tucked in, I pulled out my laptop and started digging. Most resources I found were either too abstract—full of words like justice and protest that don’t mean much to a kid who still thinks stealing a crayon is the worst crime possible—or too heavy, leading with stories of segregation and violence that 5-year-olds don’t have the context to process. Plenty of listicles just said “teach kindness” and called it a day, which didn’t answer the actual question my kid brought home.
A week later, one of my own students held up a brown crayon during self-portrait time and made a face. “This is poop color,” she said. “I don’t want to be poop color.” That’s when I stopped relying on the district’s pre-made list and started testing what actually stuck, both in my classroom and at my kitchen table.
The first thing I learned is that anti-racism for little kids doesn’t have to be one big, serious conversation. Five-year-olds think in sensory, concrete terms. They sort blocks by color and stickers by shape, and they notice every difference between the people around them. Pretending no one sees skin color doesn’t make that observation go away—it just means kids fill gaps with whatever offhand line they hear on the playground, or a throwaway joke from a relative at Thanksgiving.
The first resource I pulled from my classroom shelf was The Colors of Us by Karen Katz, a picture book about a little girl who walks through her neighborhood noticing all the different shades of brown skin around her. I didn’t just read it once and put it back. After we finished, I pulled spice jars out of the pantry: cinnamon for my skin, paprika for Leo’s, nutmeg for his best friend Mia, deep cocoa powder for Jamal. We poured little spoonfuls into bowls, smelled each one, and held pinches up to our wrists to match. Leo talked about that for two weeks straight, and brought little sealed baggies to school for show-and-tell. It stuck way better than any 20-minute lecture I could have given.
I wasted $18 on a viral best-selling anti-racism board book around the same time, the one that popped up on every parent list online. Every page had big abstract words and illustrations of crowds holding protest signs, and Leo lost interest before the third page, sliding off the couch to play with his trucks. That’s my filter now: if it’s written more to make grown-ups feel like they’re doing the right thing than to hold a 5-year-old’s attention, it doesn’t get a spot on the shelf. Half the diversity books I used to keep in my classroom only showed Black and brown characters talking about being treated unfairly. I swapped most out for books where BIPOC kids just do regular kid stuff: lose a tooth, bake cookies with grandma, chase the ice cream truck. If the only time kids see brown skin is in stories about hardship, they walk away thinking brown people only have bad things happen to them, not that they like sticky popsicles and dinosaur stickers just like everyone else.
Screen time gets a bad rap, but 10-minute clips are some of my go-to low-lift resources. I keep the Sesame Street Celebrating Our Skin collection saved to our YouTube queue, and we put one on most Saturdays while we wait for pancake batter to cook. I don’t pause every 30 seconds to point out a lesson. Sometimes Leo will glance over and say, “That girl has cocoa skin like Jamal,” and I’ll just say “yep” and flip the bacon. Molly of Denali is another quiet win; the show centers an Alaska Native girl going about regular kid life, fishing with her grandpa and solving playground mysteries, and never hits you over the head with a message.
Small changes to the stuff we already own make more difference than any fancy book, too. After that first graham cracker question, I dumped out Leo’s bin of little toy people and realized every single one had the same peachy skin. I picked up a $10 multiracial pack from the grocery store the next week, added a Black firefighter, Latinx doctor, and Indigenous teacher to the block bin, and didn’t say a word about it. A week later, he had both the white firefighter and the Black firefighter putting out a block fire side by side, no fanfare required. I swapped his old crayon pack, which labeled the single peachy shade “flesh,” for a $6 multicultural pack with 12 different skin tone options. It’s a tiny change, but it means no kid in my class or my living room has to call their own skin “poop color” because there’s no crayon that matches them.
When it comes to naming unfairness, not just celebrating difference, I keep Jacqueline Woodson’s The Other Side on hand. It follows two little girls, one Black and one white, separated by a fence that marks the segregated line in their town. I don’t get into Jim Crow laws or centuries of oppression when I read it. I just say, “A long time ago, some grown-ups made a really silly, unfair rule that said people with different skin colors couldn’t play together. That rule was wrong, and these girls decided to be friends anyway.” Five-year-olds get unfair rules. They deal with them every day on the playground, when some kid says you can’t play on the slide because you’re wearing pink. That framework makes sense to them, no big lecture required.
I still fumble all the time. Last Thanksgiving, Leo repeated a mean stereotype about Mexican families he’d overheard from a distant relative, and I froze mid-mashed potato pass. I just told him the joke wasn’t kind and we don’t say that, then spent an hour that night scrolling the weekly 2-minute tip email from The Conscious Kid’s early childhood list, trying to figure out how to circle back. The next morning, we watched a 10-minute cartoon segment about a visiting Mexican family, and after it ended I said, “Remember that joke you heard yesterday? It was wrong because it said all people from one place are the same, which isn’t true any more than all the kids in your class like the same snack.” He nodded and asked for a chocolate chip cookie, and that was it. It wasn’t a polished teaching moment, but it landed.
Last weekend, Jamal came over for a playdate. They were tearing around the backyard, sticky with blue popsicle, when Leo stopped dead and held his forearm up next to Jamal’s. “Hey,” he said, “your skin is cocoa and mine is cinnamon. They’re both yummy.” Jamal laughed and shoved him into the clover, and they went right back to chasing our dog around the oak tree.
I sat on the porch step with Jamal’s mom and laughed, but I still think about that first question at the kitchen counter. None of these resources are magic. I still freeze sometimes when Leo asks a question I don’t know how to answer, and I still end up looking up scripts after he goes to bed. Some days I worry I’m saying too much, other days I worry I’m not saying enough. It doesn’t wrap up neatly. It’s just small, ordinary moments, one spice jar and picture book and 10-minute cartoon at a time.
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