When I first saw this title and the book cover I was excited for the teen boys in our group that we would have a book with some sports content – I was pleased when I found that the writing was so well done and packed with important historical information during the Civil Rights era of 1960s!
One of the first things we did when starting the book was entering Perry Wallace’s dates in our Book of Centuries. If you’re unfamiliar with what a Book of Centuries is, it’s basically a timeline book of history where you write down important people, places, and events. Perry Wallace was the very first black basketball player in the SEC (South Eastern Conference of college basketball teams.) This book tells his story and is filled with first person quotes and first hand experiences of racial tensions in Nashville and around the south during the 1960s.
While reading the story I was reminded of many displays at the Tennessee State Museum about the Civil Rights movement in Nashville. The website Tennessee 4 Me has some great information to supplement the study of Civil Rights at their website. When we took a trip up to the museum this month it was fun to find a display with Perry Wallace’s information!
The book party was a lot of fun to plan with activities centered around basketball! We split the students in two groups and one group worked on making a fun basketball treat to take home while the other group watched some videos about the history of dunking in college basketball.
To make our basketball treat cup we took a plastic cup and drew lines on it to look like the basketball net and then decorated our own backboard then attached to the cup. An orange is the perfect treat to go in the cup but we also let the kids fill it with leftover Halloween candy! (Our party was November 1!)
Upstairs, students enjoyed watching some famous dunk shots and talked about the rules that changed throughout Perry Wallace’s career. The kids were amazed at how high the basketball rim is in order for a player to jump and dunk!
The food was a lot of fun to plan – we all just brought something that was themed with basketballs! We had a basketball fruit pizza, basketball topped cupcakes, popcorn in basketball cups, basketball themed quesadillas, basketball themed bean dip, and more! (Pinterest was a great help with ideas on this one!)
Some resources that we enjoyed during the month of reading this book are as follows:
- Video of an interview with Perry Wallace
- Discussion Guide by the author
- Supplement guide from Vanderbilt
I’m hoping to take the kids to a Vanderbilt basketball game this season to continue celebrating this wonderful book! Also, just to clarify – we read the Young Reader’s Edition of Strong Inside. There is an original edition that is about 4x as long. The edition we read was the perfect length for a month of read aloud chapters.
Strong Inside – Young Readers Edition
The inspirational true story of the first African American to play college basketball in the deeply segregated Southeastern Conference–a powerful moment in Black history.
Perry Wallace was born at an historic crossroads in U.S. history. He entered kindergarten the year that the Brown v. Board of Education decision led to integrated schools, allowing blacks and whites to learn side by side. A week after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Wallace enrolled in high school and his sensational jumping, dunking, and rebounding abilities quickly earned him the attention of college basketball recruiters from top schools across the nation. In his senior year his Pearl High School basketball team won Tennessee’s first racially-integrated state tournament.
KIND + CULTIVATED 