Zuri Builds a Bridge

A Ten-Page Story to Read and Color

Ages 4–9 · Black Coloring Books

Ages 4–9 · Engineering · Persistence · Community

Zuri Builds a Bridge

A Ten-Page Story to Read and Color

The creek on Sweetwater Lane is too wide to jump and too deep to wade, and Zuri's friends are stuck on the other side. Her first bridge washes away in a storm. Then her grandfather opens a shoebox of old photographs and shows her the one shape that holds: the arch. Ten rhyming pages, ten detailed line drawings, one girl who finds out that a plan plus a neighborhood equals a road where there wasn't one.

Story spine: Story · Setback · Elder wisdom · Build · Triumph
Who you're coloring: Zuri Akintola, seven years old, two afro puffs with yellow beads, denim overalls, red high-tops, and a pencil that never leaves her ear.

14 pages · 8.5 × 11 PDF · cover, story pages and a blank plaque to finish

Read it first — free

All ten pages

On Sweetwater Lane, where the mockingbirds sing,

Lives Zuri, who draws almost every small thing.

Her pencil stays tucked in her puff of soft hair,

And plans fill her notebook with room left to spare.

Coloring page of Zuri sitting on her porch steps drawing in a notebook while a mockingbird watches

But down past the porches, the creek cuts the street,

Too wide for a jump and too deep for her feet.

Her friends wave from over the water each day,

So close she can hear them, too far off to play.

Coloring page of Zuri calling across a wide creek to two friends waving from the far bank

She dragged out a plank from the back of the shed

And walked it out slow to the creek's muddy bed.

It reached halfway over and stopped in the middle —

A start, and a good one, but far, far too little.

Coloring page of Zuri dragging a long wooden plank toward the creek beside a garden shed

Then Tuesday brought thunder that rattled the town,

And rain turned the creek to a wide, rushing brown.

By morning her plank had gone floating away,

And nothing she'd built was left standing that day.

Coloring page of a thunderstorm flooding the creek while Zuri watches from a lit window

She sat on the wet bank and let herself frown.

Her notebook was soggy, the pages all brown.

“I'm only a kid,” Zuri told the gray sky.

“Some things are too big, and I'm too small to try.”

Coloring page of Zuri sitting alone on the creek bank with her chin on her knees

Then Grandpa Ade eased on down by her side

With a shoebox of photos he'd saved up with pride.

He showed her an arch he had built out of stone.

“A curve holds the weight,” he said. “You're not alone.”

Coloring page of Grandpa Ade showing Zuri a photograph of a stone arch bridge

So Zuri stood up and she called down the block

For Marcus, Imani, and old Mr. Locke.

She drew out the arch on the back of a sack:

“We'll curve it,” she told them. “And curves do not crack.”

Coloring page of Zuri on a stoop showing her arch drawing to neighbors gathered around

They hauled up the stones from the lot on the hill.

They mixed up the mortar with muscle and will.

They stacked every rock on the curve she had drawn

And worked through the sunset and into the dawn.

Coloring page of the whole neighborhood building a stone arch bridge together

When morning came golden, she stepped on the edge.

It held. So she walked to the top of the ledge.

Then Marcus ran over, Imani did too,

And Sweetwater Lane had a road that was new.

Coloring page of Zuri standing triumphantly at the top of the finished stone bridge

Now Zuri walks over most every bright day

And waves at her friends who come running her way.

Her name's in the stone at the foot of the span —

So what will you build, little builder? You can.