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Looking for a great way to celebrate Mother’s Day? Read a book together and try these activities.

The books below are just some of the books identified by Search Institute that model behaviors that make families stronger: collaborating, encouraging and exploring.

Read these books together and use the activities listed after each book to grow together as a family.

Brothers At Bat: The True Story of An Amazing All-Brother Baseball Team by Audrey Vernick; illustrated by Steven Salerno

The kindness and generosity of the Acerra family helped their twelve sons become the longest-playing all-brother baseball team in history.

This book shows collaborating: learning, growing and solving problems with your child.

Try this after reading:

Your family is like a team. Each person plays a different role and has different talents. To help your family recognize these, sit down as a group and have each person write or draw pictures of a strength they think each member of the family brings to your team. Talk as a family about the work you do to support one another, as well as skills you can teach one another.

Abuela by Arthur Dorros; illustrated by Elisa Kleven

Take flight with Rosalba and her grandmother as they soar in Rosalba’s imagination all over New York City, visiting family and seeing places with special meaning to Abuela.

This book shows exploring: exposing your child to new ideas, experiences and places.

Try this after reading:

Maps offer fun opportunities to talk about and discover places of importance to you.
Talk with your child about familiar locations, like the places where friends and family live and work, then draw a map together that includes those spots. Or, ask your child to invent a world they’d like to travel to, then draw a map of it and pretend you’re visiting that place together. What do you see, smell or hear? Talk with your child about this new world and the things that make it different from your own.

My Name is Yoon by Helen Recorvits; illustrated by Gabi Swiatkowska

Yoon feels unhappy after her family moves from Korea to the United States, until she gets encouragement at home and at school and learns to write her name in English.

This book shows encouraging: praising your child’s efforts and achievements.

Talk and ask questions as you read:

• Tell your child about a time you felt like you didn’t belong. ASK: Has that happened to you? What did you do? Did someone help you feel included?
• Yoon’s parents are proud of her when she sings to them in English. Remind your child about a time you were proud of him or her. ASK: What are you proud of?

Educators and program leaders serving children in need can find more books with tips and activities in the Build Strong Families with Stories section of the First Book Marketplace. Developed in partnership with  Search Institute, through generous funding from Disney, each book comes with a FREE downloadable tipsheet with tips and discussion questions like the ones above.

The post Celebrate Mother’s Day: Read a Book Together! appeared first on First Book Blog.

Fourteen months ago I started an ambitious writing project — ambitious because it would be set in a foreign country; one where I have not lived or even visited: The Dominican Republic.

It was supposed to be about an aspiring baseball player growing up on the streets of San Pedro de Macorís, “The Cradle of Shortstops.” It is still about him, but it is also about a sensitive American girl named Maya who takes an interest in the same player, years later when he is in the minor leagues and struggling. It is about a baseball blogger named Grace, and a Haitian girl named Bijou, and it’s about bees.

I’ve learned a lot from the writing. I’ve learned a bit of Spanish and a heck of a lot about the D.R. I’ve come to think of it with the same fondness and familiarity as places I’ve lived.

It’s really different from my other books. I was inspired by the likes of Beverly Cleary and Gary Paulsen to write with more emotional frankness, abandoning the masters-program-learned habit of using subtle hints at hidden feelings. I wrote in the third person instead of the first person, and there are two point-of-view characters instead of one. I let the characters and their decisions drive all the plot turns, and it makes for a less eventful book than the last few, with their marauding robots and invasive fungi, but there are still some twists and turns and reveals. And, for what it’s worth, there is not a single white boy in the story.

I don’t know if the rest of the world will love this book, but it’s I’m glad I wrote it and I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done and in any case I’m stuck with it now. I finished it last night.

(Photo from Living Learning on Flickr)

First Pitch:  How Baseball Began by John Thorn. Beach Ball Books, 2011
Review copy provided by publisher

Beach Ball is producing some very well done sports books.  I like their typography and the design which includes a nice balance of white space, text boxes and illustrations. The information easy to read and assimilate.  The pages are numbered which is helpful to students learning to cite facts.  They include an index, short glossary, photo and illustration credits and a list of web resources.

There is a wealth of information here on the origins of "America's pastime" provided by historian, John Thorn, whose credentials are very sound as he is the Official Historian for Major League Baseball.  Thorn's mission here, is to share the background of baseball's origins and examine the real contributions of Abner Doubleday and Alexander Cartwright.  Thorn's conclusions may surprise fans who have seen the plaques at Cooperstown. He traces the history of the game from an early children's game to the year, 1845, when William R. Wheaton wrote down some of the first rules for club play. 

Thor's story reads like a detective tale which engages even casual fans, like myself.  Highly recommend this title for all school library collections.


Review copies from my public library.

Author, Phil Bildner is recalling the great stories and legends of baseball for a new generation.  Beginning with Shoeless Joe & Black Betsy, which was chosen for the Texas Bluebonnet Award in 2004, Bildner tells the story of Shoeless Joe Jackson and his s

Phil Bildner and Loren Long announce that their series, Barnstormers, is getting a new look and a new title, Sluggers.

The series weaves baseball history, American history and fantasy into the story of the three Payne kids, Griffith, Ruby, and Graham, who are trying to understand the magic in a special baseball that belonged to their father. Along with the Travelin' Nine baseball team, they travel from city to city, around the country to earn money to pay off the Payne family's debt. When the games begin, strange things start to happen.

Loren Long's characters bend, twist, stretch, and arch. To me, his style evokes the New Deal/WPA art of the 1930s /40s. The pictures anchor the series with a strong sense of Americana and history.

Nice new trailer about the series: