Race Relations Connections Discovered on Road Trip With Grandma in Adventurous Read from Popular Author Nic Stone

Best-selling author Nic Stone's Clean Getaway is a must-have for young readers who are sometimes reluctant to learn about history. The Civil Rights Era is an important historical concept for children to learn in order to walk into the future with good race relations. This fun read has all the elements of a book that will draw in young readers with adventure, travel, and relationships with family. Many young readers are members of an interracial family in our society today. Scoob has a white grandma and young readers will be delighted to engage in a story with characters that they might be able to relate to.

Spring vacation is here and Scoob is not looking forward to the boredom that this will bring for him. He is on house arrest for some trouble in school and spring vacation will not be the spring break that he imagined. He is excited when Grandma comes up with an adventurous idea. How about a road trip to the South to learn about the past racial relations in our country and how things might be different now. Scoob has no idea about the racial relations of the past. He just knows that he has a white grandma and his grandfather is African-American. His grandmother was supposed to make this trip with Grandpa, but because of their interracial marriage, this was not possible. Scoob is excited to have the opportunity.

Grandma is ready to travel with her prized possession of the Green Book. Important sites in the South are listed with important facts about how these sites are connected to the Civil Rights Era. Their first stop in Alabama presents the first opportunity for Scoob to begin learning things that he never imagined. A lot of facts are disturbing, but they are presented in the story as part of the learning adventure. Scoob and his grandma visit Memphis, Jackson, Mississippi, Houston and Dallas on their tour of the South. Stone mixes history with adventure and presents engaging opportunities for young readers to create conversations about racial relations in their world today. The title has a connection to Scoob's grandma's strange behavior while on their travels. Did she have a reason for changing the license plate on her van? The conclusion explains the title.

Clean Getaway was published by Crown Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin/Random House and is recommended for ages 8-12. It has an ISBN of 978-1-9848-9297-3.

Nic Stone's Clean Getaway can be a valuable tool for teachers who teach history with past race relations as a part of the curriculum. Chapter books are a great way to engage students in reading and teachers will want to add this one to the classroom library.

*Read a few chapters each day to engage students in Scoob's story. How many students have taken a road trip to the South? Have a globe available for students to locate the states that make up the South.

*Call attention to the fact that Scoob has a white grandma. Take a class poll of students in the class or your school who are part of an interracial family. This can open interesting conversations for the students.

*Assign groups of students to each place that Scoob and his grandma visit. Assign a group project to report on the importance of sites in the racial history of our country that they visit. Some facts may be disturbing to students.

*Engage students in a conversation about events from the past with race relations that they find disturbing. Why do they think these events happened in the past in our country.

*Take a class poll of students who feel that race relations are better now and students who feel that we still have a long way to go to solve racial issues in our country.