“Hope is the thing with feathers – that perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words And never stops – at all”
Migrations: Open Hearts. Open Borders, is a small selection of hundreds of illustrations sent in by postcard by children’s book authors from all around the world.
Intended for an exhibition, the call was put out to authors and illustrators to design a postcard that represents how they see the issue of migration. Many of these postcards were first shown in September 2017 at an exhibition in Bratislava.
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Each postcard shows a bird of some type, on the move. This bird shows the importance of those hundreds of thousands of migrants who must move away from their homeland every year to find somewhere safer to live – not always knowing where that might be.
The book is broken up into two sections: Arrivals and Departures and each picture and message that follows in that chapter shows what hope, change and the unknown can do.
Each double page can be mused upon and used as springboards into discussions, lessons and action.
You can question the importance of grassroots action, small kind gestures and people power.
You can look at how a simple image or quote can resonate within your soul and invoke hope, protest or desperation.
Children will love seeing the different interpretations of this concept and reading the quotes that match.
They may feel inspired to find out more about who the migrants of the world are and how they can help them.
If anything, bringing about an awareness that people like this do exist in our world is important, and this book does just that.
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Lesson ideas
- Create your own postcard using the theme of migration.
- Explore the different pathways migratory birds around the world make each year. Explore what is threatening their movement and safety. Compare this to the people of the world.
- Explore who is migrating each day in our world and why.
- Ask: Is migration necessary? And ponder the statement: Migration should be stopped immediately.
- Compare and contrast the different ways people migrate and explore why these exist. Create the best way for migration to occur after understanding why people need to migrate each day.
