Blog Tour: Michelle Obama- Anna Doherty

I am so excited to be taking part in the blog tour for The Fantastically Feminist (and totally true) story of the INSPIRATIONAL ACTIVIST AND CAMPAIGNER Michelle Obama by Anna Doherty.

My 6 year old has been a fan of non-fiction for sometime and I’ve been interested in introducing her to age-appropriate biographies of interesting and inspiring people and this series is not only interesting, but also empowering to young girls too. This book telling the story of Michelle Obama is perfect to round off Black History Month.

The layout is excellent, I love the way the book begins with an annotated family tree and then follows across the pages in a chronological manner before finishing with first a layout exploring the favourite things of Michelle Obama and then a more formally written consideration of her influence and legacy.

Michelle’s resilience and intelligence is shown from her early age dedication to learning, to practicing piano and accepting a long journey to attend a High School that gives her opportunities for a good future.

It also focuses on how Michelle Obama has always been a diligent and community minded person from her involvement in school activities and clubs and works hard to help people of colour feel important and included even at Princeton and Harvard before doing the empowering young girls to work hard and aspire first with her daughters and then girls everywhere.

All these are incredibly empowering to children to see someone raise up from a working class background facing racial prejudices and still most importantly become not only powerful but influential and kind in both of these.

I particularly love the way that the author-illustrator Anna Doherty has taken Michelle’s favourite colour Lavender as the colour theme running throughout this book, it adds an extra special touch!

This book hits on so many levels both educationally and from an access point of view as whilst older students will be able to extract facts and make some conclusions from it even young children can get something from it as a story of her life meaning it will keep giving and pushing thinking over the years.

Littlefae is 6 and we used this book practice extraction from a source picking out facts about Michelle Obama and make a poster and she found it a fun activity to look through and decide what was important enough to pick out from the pages.

We also had a great conversation about Michelle’s campaigns for equality and inclusion in regards to people of colour and women & girls. This book helped Littlefae to frame these issues with immediate empathy.

I managed to get a picture before she coloured it in… and went a little crazy with the gel pens!! But the educational value remains!!

We thoroughly enjoyed exploring this book and the learning opportunities that have arisen from it.

We are also excited to try some more from this range and Littlefae is especially excited that there is going to be an Emma Watson book as she is a big fan of her acting as Hermione and Belle!

The Fantastically Feminist (and totally true) story of the INSPIRATIONAL ACTIVIST AND CAMPAIGNER Michelle Obama by Anna Doherty is published by Wren & Rook.