Booktalking Colorado - Full Booktalk Record

Booktalking Colorado Full Record:

	Title:	A Kids Guide to America’s Bill of Rights
	Author:	Krull, Kathleen
	Date Published:	1999
	Genre:	Non-Fiction
	Grade Level:	7 - 8
	Booktalker:	Kathy Preller

Booktalk:
Teachers may want to leave the room while I talk about this book. It’s a book about rights. Kids rights. Do you have the right to wear green hair to school? Do you have the right to play any music you want? Do you have the right to print whatever you want in your school newspaper? Back in the days when our forefathers started up this country, they wrote a Constitution. You’ve all heard of that. It tells all about how our government should be run. But people worried that a government could become too powerful. Remember, most of those people had come from countries where the governments became more and more powerful, while the people lost their rights and freedoms. So people insisted that we needed a Bill of Rights to protect citizens from our own government. That’s right – protect us from our own government. Here it is (pg. 4- 5). This is the whole thing. Two pages. Only 462 words long, it is your key to freedom. Many of our most famous court cases involve Bill of Rights issues, and many of those cases involve kids and schools. For almost 200 years kids had to recite prayers in school. In 1962, a bunch of students and their parents objected, and took their complaint all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court agreed that the government should not compose official prayers, and therefore children could not be forced to pray in government supported schools. Almost 40 years have gone by, and people are still arguing about this one. Did you ever read Bridge to Terabithia or Little House on the Prairie? How about Sideways Stories from Wayside School, or any of R.L. Stine’s Goosebump series? (or: How to Eat Fried Worms The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe Little Red Riding Hood Superfudge) These books all have something in common – they’ve all been challenged. That means some people out there want to ban them – take them out of the schools and libraries. That’s called censorship. So far all the court cases have ruled against the school boards that remove books from libraries. Parents can exercise censorship over what their own children read, but the Supreme Court declared that officials cannot remove books in order to deny students access to ideas about politics, religion, or any other matters of opinion. You do have first amendment rights. Find out what other rights you have with A Kid’s Guide to America’s Bill of Rights, by Kathleen Krull. It shows exactly how history can affect you.