I just love the class assignment where the young student writes down their favorite recipe (a lesson in procedural writing). It really gives a peek to how children perceive their world. This assignment is usually assigned during Thanksgiving and the results include things like “turn the dial to ‘seven’ and put the turkey in the oven for ten or fifteen minutes and eat it.” I have also seen teachers have the students tell them how to make a jelly sandwich, where the teacher follows the instructions to the letter. When the student says “put the jelly on the bread”, the teacher will put the jar of jelly on top of the loaf of bread. Of course, the students let out an exasperated sigh and realize there is a lot more explaining involved in order to have the other person understand what needs to be done in the process. The student needs to understand that the other person may not have the same understanding about things.

Trying to get young ones to understand others’ points of view can be difficult. This is mostly because of the developmental stage they may be in, but also because children may not have experienced the situations themselves. Children can empathize when a friend falls down and scrapes her knee because it has happened to them many, many times. But how do you explain something like color to someone who cannot see it.

The Black Book of Colors by Menena Cottin and illustrated by Rosana Faria does just that. The narrator’s friend Thomas uses figurative language involving imagery. The senses touch, taste, smell, or hearing are used to describes colors. “Yellow... is soft as a baby chick’s feathers”, “Red is sour like unripe strawberries”, “green ... smells like grass that’s just been cut”, and “brown crunches under his feet like fall leaves”.

The book is completely black - cover, pages and illustrations. Only the printed words are white and are located on the bottom of the page under the Braille text. The Braille text and illustrations are embossed in black onto the pages creating an interesting arrangement of ridges to explore. School Library Journal stated that this book is “(m)eant to be experienced with the fingers instead of the eyes, this extraordinary book allows sighted readers to experience colors the way blind people do: through the other senses”. But if you hold the book just-so under the light, you can see the illustrations and check if you correctly guessed what the various pictures are.

The Black Book of Colors was originally published in Mexico and won the Bologna Ragazzi Award at the New Horizons Bologna Children’s Book Fair in 2007. Author Menena Cottin explained that:

“(b)ack in Caracas I began to teach drawing to adults, I also wrote and illustrated a few children's books that were published in Venezuela. Meanwhile my interest in writing kept growing. I remembered being in front of a blank page with a question mark in my head: how would my life be if I could not see? As a graphic designer and illustrator, it's really difficult for me to imagine a world without colors. I tried my best to interpret the way a blind child perceives an absolutely visual stimuli like color. That was my challenge: 'The black book of colors'”.

To learn to appreciate other points of view is a valuable life lesson. The Web site Planet Esme said "The Black Book of Colors by Menena Cottin “ ... shifts the focus from thinking of blindness as a disability or deficit to simply considering it a difference ... and allow(s) your sighted readers to begin to imagine the experience from another point of view”.

book cover photo: wordpress.com pages photos: underconsideration.com