JacketFlap connects you to the work of more than 200,000 authors, illustrators, publishers and other creators of books for Children and Young Adults. The site is updated daily with information about every book, author, illustrator, and publisher in the children's / young adult book industry. Members include published authors and illustrators, librarians, agents, editors, publicists, booksellers, publishers and fans. Join now (it's free).
Login or Register for free to create your own customized page of blog posts from your favorite blogs. You can also add blogs by clicking the "Add to MyJacketFlap" links next to the blog name in each post.
Blog Posts by Tag
In the past 7 days
Blog Posts by Date
Click days in this calendar to see posts by day or month
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: World Literacy, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 25 of 45
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: World Literacy in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
Julia Donaldson is one of the UK’s most popular children’s authors. As I learned in the new exhibition at at Seven Stories in Newcastle, UK , she started her career writing songs for children’s television – which I must have heard as a child watching Play School. In 1993, one of those songs was made into a book, A Squash and A Squeeze, and illustrated by Axel Scheffler, so beginning a partnership that has become renowned the world over, thanks especially to their book The Gruffalo. Other illustrators who have worked with Julia include Karen George, Emily Gravett, Lydia Monks, David Roberts and Nick Sharratt. Indeed, since 1993, Julia has written over one hundred books and plays for children and teenagers.
Last year, Julia became the UK’s Children’s Laureate. This year, there is the exhibition about her, her work and some of her illustrators and I not only had the good fortune to be there for yesterday’s opening, but also the privilege of a quick interview (you can read my post about the whole day here). I had time for just three questions…
First of all I asked about the background to her book The Magic Paintbrush, which I wrote a post about going on five (gulp) years ago… Rereading that post, yes, it’s still a favorite, which is why it wasn’t the book I took with me to ask Julia to sign: I didn’t have time to go through all the various piles of books in my boys’ rooms to find it! The Magic Paintbrush is the retelling in verse of a Chinese legend in which the heroine Shen helps her fellow villagers with food and essentials thanks to a magic paintbrush given to her by a mysterious gentleman: but things get dangerous for Shen when the Emperor finds out about the magic paintbrush and wants it for himself…
So, about the book’s background, Julia told me that a friend of hers had been running a multicultural project in Stirling, Scotland, with local women from different countries telling traditional stories from their cultures. One woman told the story of The Magic Paintbrush. After hearing the story, Julia originally envisaged writing it as a play, and in fact, often uses the book during school visits as there’s plenty of scope for getting a whole class involved in acting out the story, with Julia herself playing Shen and the teacher as the Wicked Emperor! And it’s also a great vehicle for Julia to pass on her passion for language as she invites children to come up with objects for Shen to paint and thereby make real – as long as they have two syllables to fit the rhythm of the original verse. Interestingly, Julia also acted The Magic Paintbrush out with children last year at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh to promote two resource packs for schools produced by Amnesty International (you can
0 Comments on Poetry Friday: interview with Julia Donaldson and her Library Poem as of 1/1/1900
Have you already started? Or is your pile of books ready to go? Who are you going to read to? Who is going to read to you? If you haven’t registered yet, head over to LitWorld right away…
We’ll be reading to each other in the car and at home, and imagining a world where everyone can read…
0 Comments on World Read Aloud Day is today – who are you sharing it with? as of 1/1/1900
I’m posting my week-end book review a day early to clock in with Poetry Friday as a couple of days ago I received a review copy of Kate Coombs and Meilo So‘s new book Water Sings Blue, which Kate gave us a glimpse of back in January when her first copies arrived (and if you don’t know Kate’s blog, Book Aunt, it’s well worth a read). It arrived just in time to squeeze it into our Water in Multicultural Children’s Books theme…
Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Dori at Dori Reads…
Kate Coombs, illustrated by Meilo So, Water Sings Blue: Ocean Poems
Chronicle Books, 2012.
Ages 4-11
The finely tuned observation in both the poetry and illustrations of Water Sings Blue draws young readers into that world of the shoreline where time just seems to disappear and exploration offers up endless possibilities for discovery. Kate Coombs’ poems are satisfyingly memorable, with their cohesive patterns of meter and rhyme that, nevertheless, contain plenty of surprises – like, for example, the alliteration and internal rhyming at the end of “Sand’s Story”, in which mighty rocks have turned to sand:
Now we grind and we grumble,
humbled and grave,
at the touch of our breaker
and maker, the wave.
… Not to mention the witty pun on “breaker”: and the gentle wit of Coomb’s verse also lights the imagination throughout this collection.
Turning the pages, readers encounter a vast array of sea characters, starting in the air with the seagull; then listening to “What the Waves Say” before diving down to meet the creatures of the deep: like the shy octopus author (think ink…), or the beautiful but self-absorbed fish whose tail and fins act as brushes, and who concludes his/her soliloquy with the wonderfully evocative: “I’m a water artist. / You wouldn’t understand.” As well as creatures like sharks and jellyfish, there are poems about fascinating, less well-known fish – “Oarfish”, “Gulper Eel” and “Nudibranch”: they could become a follow-up project by themselves! There’s also a deep-sea shipwreck, and back on the sea shore, a gnarled “Old Driftwood” telling stories “to all the attentive / astonished twigs”, and a property agent hermit crab with a salesman’s patter.
Bringing all the poems together in a visual feast are Meilo So’s gorgeous watercolors. As well as her depiction of jewel-colored corals and waves in every shade of blue imaginable, her illustrations are clearly also influenced by direct observation of the shoreline around her Shetland Isle home, from fishermen’s cottages to diving gannets.
Just like in real beachcombing, young readers will lose track of time as they pore over So’s seashores for
0 Comments on Poetry Friday/Week-end Book Review: Water Sings Blue by Kate Coombs, illustrated by Meilo So as of 1/1/1900
[Sara Hudson joined our team of contributors last year, bringing her perception and love of children's books to the book reviews she has written for us. You can read more about her on our About Us page, including an allusion to her travels that have centered on book collections around the world (and, in fact, we first met Sara at the International Youth Library stand at the Bologna Book Fair last year...). With this post, Sara introduces a short series focusing on e-books for children that will include an overview of multicultural e-books and interviews with two authors who have embraced the e-book format, Janet Wong and Hazel Edwards.
- Marjorie]
e-troducing the e-book
The degree to which debates about e-books can polarize begins to make sense after we consider how we often frame their presence as a question of alleged murder. “Will the e-book kill off traditional books?” It’s the perennial question at the front of the mind of cultural critics and librarians hovering at the back of any crowd rushing out for the latest Kindle, iPad, Nook or other e-reader. In turn, the question of e-books draws its roots from deeper long-standing concerns, those surrounding the question “Is the book dead?”
Despite decades of worry, the book is not, in fact, dead; nor has the e-book yet killed off traditional books. E-books developed from work in the mid-1970s to create image- and text-based publications for computers – themselves still a fairly new and ungainly technology. Advances in technologies and software programs ricocheted the development of e-books and their subsequent e-readers forward in the 1990s. Today e-books are visual and/or aural publications readable on digital devices, which often cost a fraction of the price of traditional books, and offer the advantage of portability and accessibility to large numbers of texts at once.
That said, the e-book industry remains in its infancy, and its approach to all books, especially those for infants and children, evolves every day. E-book readers pose considerable technical issues. Amazon and Apple, two companies historically known not to play well with others, if at all, both have proprietary restrictions, so buyers can only read book purchases on Kindles or iPads, respectively (although you can download a Kindle reader to your PC). Additionally, as evidenced by the overarching debate about e-books, “Will they kill off traditional books?”, e-books evoke enormous emotional responses from readers. “Traditional” readers argue, for example, that reading a book on a machine cannot substitute for reading a physical book, that the medium is part of the message, that a machine is a sterile substitute for the tactile experience of reading.
The emotional questions of e-books reveal themselves nowhere as strongly as they do with e-books for children, particularly picture books aimed at early readers. As this recent article from The New York Times reports, “[e-books for children] represent less than 5 percent of total annual sales of children’s books, several publishers estimated, compared with more than 25 percent in some categories of adult books.” Children’s e-books present practical arguments (teething toddlers + expensive electronics = definite disaster), practical unknowns (when do bells and whistles enhance and when do they distract?), and questions of the practices of adults themselves, particularly those of middle class income, many of whom rely on their own ability to flip through a book – or that of a librarian, teacher, or fellow parent –
0 Comments on e-troducing the e-book as of 11/30/2011 2:22:00 PM
Today we welcome Anthony Garcia, a writer for the Online Graduate Programs website, with a thought-provoking article about why it is so important to ensure children have access to a diverse array of multicultural/cross-cultural books.
Anthony recently completed his graduate education in English Literature. A New Mexico native, he currently resides and writes in Seattle, Washington. He writes primarily about education, travel, literature, and American culture.
Educating people through literacy can last a lifetime, because it allows for empowerment. If someone can read information, they can continue to learn and educate themselves for a lifetime.
Have you ever run across someone who was woefully ignorant of diversity? It is a shame that so many people cannot appreciate the value of other cultures and be interested in the different ways social groups all over the world operate. Perhaps these people would have been more interested in learning about and appreciating different cultures if they were more literate and could assess information accordingly.
Not all of us can attend graduate programs or are even exposed to reading as children. However, it is the responsibility of educated people to share the gift of education, empowering others to learn.
One of the best ways to help others through literacy is to begin sharing books in childhood. It can be difficult to expose children to new viewpoints, especially in areas where there are not significant minority populations. However, using books is a good start to combating ignorance. If children are exposed to other viewpoints, it raises levels of literacy, but also helps them to see similarity, rather than focus on the issues which divide as adults.
Parents and educators are aware that children need to read and to be read to, and should try to pick up books that focus on other cultures, nations and groups. Books about other countries are easy to find in any local library, and children will enjoy seeing pictures of children all over the world who, in some cases, are actually quite similar to them. Children can also learn about the foods that other cultures enjoy and perhaps prepare some of them as part of a class project. Another option is to have students read about the various holidays that are celebrated all over the world and enjoy a class party!
Besides books that just discuss the facts and figures about different countries, if can be fun to explore the folklore of various groups. Most civilizations have legends and fables describing how the world began and the origins of evil. It is interesting to compare all accounts and see how they are similar and different. Educating others through literacy should involve discussion for the most impactful education possible.
Reading culturally diverse books to children is important because it broadens their horizons while increasing literacy. Through reading about the different ways people consider similar situations, children learn to be aware of the validity of others’ cultures and opinions. It is much easier to influence a child’s opinion of the world than it is an adult’s because they have fewer preconceived notions about the world around them. Therefore, the stories that we share with children can have impactful influence on their development and their value systems as adults.
Perhaps if adults and educators made reading culturally diverse books to children a priority, there would be fewer misunderstandings in our nation and world. Children can grow up learning to think things through from multiple viewpoints, and are able to embrace the ways that people are alike, instead of focusing on things that might divide them. Children exposed to litera
0 Comments on Guest Post: “Using Your Education to Help Others” by Anthony Garcia as of 1/1/1900
Abigail Sawyer regularly reviews books for us here at PaperTigers, and she’s also, in her own words, “a lifelong library lover and an advocate for access to books for all”, so who better to write an article for us about “unconventional libraries” and the children’s books they have inspired. Abigail lives in San Francisco, California, USA, where her two children attend a language-immersion elementary school and are becoming bilingual in English and Mandarin: an experience that has informed her work on the blog for the film Speaking in Tongues. I know you’ll enjoy reading this as much as I have.
On Traveling Libraries and Heroic ‘Book People’: Inspiring children’s books about getting books to people in remote places and difficult circumstances
My sons and I paid our first-ever visit to a bookmobile over the summer. For us it was a novelty. We have shelves of books at home and live just 3 blocks from our local branch library, but the brightly colored bus had pulled up right near the playground we were visiting in another San Francisco neighborhood (whose branch library was under renovation), and it was simply too irresistible. Inside, this library on wheels was cozy, comfortable, and loaded with more books than I would have thought possible. I urged my boys to practice restraint and choose only one book each rather than compete to reach the limit of how many books one can take out of the San Francisco Public Library system (the answer is 50; we’ve done it at least once).
The bookmobiles provide a great service even in our densely populated city where branch libraries abound. There are other mobile libraries, however, that take books to children who may live miles from even the nearest modern road; to children who live on remote islands, in the sparsely populated and frigid north, in temporary settlements in vast deserts, and in refugee camps. The heroic individuals who manage these libraries on boats, burros, vans, and camels provide children and the others they serve with a window on the world and a path into their own imaginations that would otherwise be impossible.
Shortly after my own bookmobile experience, Jeanette Winter‘sBiblioburro (Beach Lane Books, 2010), a tribute to Colombian schoolteacher Luis Soriano, who delivers books to remote hillside villages across rural Colombia, arrived in my mailbox to be reviewed for Paper Tigers. I loved this book, as I do most of Winter’s work, for its bright pictures and simple, straightforward storytelling. Another picture book, Waiting for the Bibiloburro by Monica Brown (Tricycle Press, 2011), tells the story of Soriano’s famous project from the perspective of one of the children it
0 Comments on On Traveling Libraries and Heroic ‘Book People’: Inspiring children’s books about getting books to people in remote places and difficult circumstances as of 1/1/1900
There are still a few days left before the end of Poetry Month in the US, so if you haven’t already added your lines to LitWorld‘s Global Poem for Change, there’s still time.
Poet Naomi Shihab Nye wrote the beginning and sent the poem flying across the world:
I send my words out into the air, listening for yours from everywhere.
You can follow the poem here and add your own lines here. LitWorld needs your words to help their poem grow and remember, Your Words can Change Worlds – but hurry, the last lines must be sent in my the end of April.
Here are a few of my favorite lines so far:
Speak one word, one-thousand echoes
The sounds that echo through space and time; leave imprints that shape our growing minds
Words that stir, words that drive, words that connect us all, and make us strive.
Words will soar from near to far filling hearts and opening minds –
I can hear you ever so softly- like a single falling snowflake before the blizzard.
Starting with one little syllable… one little word… I offer my peace to the world…
Spoken in love and respect in an effort to change the world
0 Comments on LitWorld’s Global Poem – have you added your line yet? as of 1/1/1900
Last year we spoke to Katie Smith Milway about her first solo children’s book One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference, selected for the Spirit of PaperTigers 2010 Book Set; it’s great to welcome her back now to talk about her latest book The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough, which promises to be equally life-changing and life-affirming as One Hen. The Good Garden is illustrated by Sylvie Daigneault and, like One Hen, is published by Kids Can Press as part of their superb CitizenKid series.
In your interview with PaperTigers last year, while touching upon the then forthcoming The Good Garden, you said, “In an era of food crisis, any child can play their part in their home or school garden, or in supporting poor farmers through acts of giving.” How have you aimed at getting that message across in the book?
The Good Garden is based on true people and events, and portrays the life of a campesino family in Honduras. They, like so many small farmers around the world eke out barely enough to live on – in a good year – and are highly vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition, when weather or insects create havoc. This family’s life is transformed, however, when a new teacher, Don Pedro, comes to the village school and gets the family’s daughter, María Luz Duarte, to help him plant a school garden – which he not only uses to teach students their basic subjects, but moreover to teach simple, sustainable agriculture methods that they can apply using their innate human resources: their heads, hands and heart. Through the caring labor of composting, terracing the hillside, planting beans among corn to keep soil nutrients in balance, and even dotting the terraces with flowers that smell bad to bugs, students see their school garden thrive on land that they all thought was too poor to keep them going. María Luz and others bring the learning home to their farms, imp
0 Comments on World Earth Day: Interview with Katie Smith Milway, author of The Good Garden as of 1/1/1900
Our current focus on Mongolia would be incomplete without a full mention of poet, writer and librarian extraordinaire, Dashdondog Jamba, who set up Mongolia’s Mobile Children’s Library more than twenty years ago in order to bring books to children even in the remotest parts of the country. We are delighted to be able to bring you a reprint of an article from IBBY’s Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature written by Dashdondog, “With the Mobile Library Through the Seasons“. Do head over to the main PaperTigers website and read it for some fascinating insight into the Mobile Library service, through this detailed description of one of its journeys. Originally the library was transported by oxcart or camel; now there is a van which clocks up thousands of kilometers every year. The library won the 2006 IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award and features in Margriet Ruurs‘ book My Librarian is a Camel: How Books are Brought to Children Around the World.
As well as ensuring that Mongolian children have access to books from all over the world, Dashdondog Jamba (sometimes also written as Jambyn) is himself the author of more than seventy children’s books. Not many are available in English but you can get a tantalising glimpse of some of them here, at the ICDL. A collection of his retellings of Mongolian Folktales was published recently and is currently our Book of the Month. Dashdondog was instrumental in setting up the Mongolian sections of both SCBWI and IBBY.
You can read an article by Dashdondog, “Children’s Literature in Mongolia Needs Renovation” written for ACCU in 2001, and his speech to IBBY’s 30th Congress in Macau in 2006. Indian author Ramendra Kumar recounts his meeting with Dashdondog here, including an unexpected prelude – and some great photos.
0 Comments on Mongolia: Dashdondog Jamba and the Mongolian Mobile Children’s Library as of 1/1/1900
Today is Girls’ Day in Japan and many girls will celebrating it with their families. I have written a post about the holiday in the past for PT. This year I’d like to draw your attention to girls in other parts of the world, namely in Canada and Afghanistan. Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan is an organization started in 2007 by a Canadian girl named Alaina Podmorow in British Columbia. After hearing a stirring talk by writer and activist Sally Armstrong about the plight of women in Afghanistan, Alaina started to fundraise by hosting a silent auction which raised enough money to support four teachers’ salaries in Afghanistan. She then contacted the organization Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and joined with them under the name she chose for her group and hence was Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan born! Check out their website for more details.
0 Comments on Girls’ Day and Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan as of 3/3/2011 1:48:00 AM
When PaperTigers’ book reviewer Abigail Sawyer mentioned to me that she is going to be hosting a Blog Carnival about bilingualism over at Speaking in Tongues today, she got me thinking. Again. I first started mulling over bilingual children’s books here in relation to Tulika Books, a publisher in India that produces bilingual books in many different Indian languages alongside English, and to former IBBY Preisdent and founder of Groundwood Books Patsy Aldana’s comments in an interview with PaperTigers, and I will quote them again here:
I have always been opposed to the use of bilingual books, however given that Spanish-only books hardly sell at all, I have had to accept that books in Spanish can only reach Latinos if they are bilingual. This goes against everything I believe and know to be true about language instruction, the joy of reading in your mother tongue…
I was surprised by Aldana’s dislike of bilingual books because I love them and my children love them, and I have found that they can be a joy for inquisitive children seeking to learn independently – but I do realise that our contexts are different. Aldana’s dislike of them seems to stem from their being a substitute for monolingual Spanish books in an English-biased market, and she has found a pragmatic way of providing books in their mother-tongue to the Latino community in North America.
We love reading bilingual books because, although our main vehicle is the English, having another language running alongside, often enhances the reading experience for us, especially where the setting of the story is culturally appropriate to the language. This is true even when we can’t read the script, because even without being able to understand it, we can sometimes pull out certain consistencies. Seeing the writing always provides a glimpse of that different culture.
One of my favorite books of the last few year’s is Jorge Luján’s Tarde de invierno/ Winter Afternoon, published by Groundwood Books – and without the original Spanish and the English lying alongside eachother, we would not have been able to appreciate so fully the simply gorgeous animation Jorge and his family produced of the book (watch it here). Some authors like Yuyi Morales effortlessly slide between English and Spanish (we love her delightful Señor Calavera and Grandma Beetle books, Just a Minute and Just in Case). Some books provide a parallel experience of language, like Demi’s Bamboo Hats and a Rice Cake or Ed Young’s Beyond the Great Mountains. None of these books is truly bilingual, in that they do not provide a similar reading experience regardless of which of the two languages you approach the story from – but they all offer a bridge between languages and cultures that is not to be understimated.
It would be very interesting to hear about the experiences and needs of truly bilingual parents and children. If you are bringing up bilingual children or have bilingual children in your class, do you or they seek out bilingual books? Are you frustrated by what’s out there –
0 Comments on Bilingual Children’s Books – good or bad? as of 1/1/1900
Geeta Dharmarajan is the Founder and Executive Director of Katha, an Indian non-profit organization working in the areas of formal and non-formal education, publishing and pro-poor activities. Read my interview with her to find out how since 1988 Katha has been helping children grow up to be India’s reader-leaders. The breadth and depth of their work is remarkable and awe-inspiring!
In case you haven’t heard, Katha was nominated by PaperTigers for the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, in the category “Promoter of Reading”.
0 Comments on Interview with Geeta Dharmarajan as of 1/1/1900
It is common knowledge that children who attend school have a better chance of developing into their full potential and bringing about change in their communities. It’s hard to believe that, in this day and age, so many of the world’s children still aren’t given the opportunity of an education.
Dedicated to “all children who dream of going to school”, Going to School in India is a celebration of what school can be and mean to children. It shows and tells about all kinds of kids—from street kids to kids who go to government and community schools—and how they “climb into school buses, sit on each other’s laps in cycle rickshaws, walk along the edges of mountains, cross scorching deserts on rickety bicycles, swing across rivers on dangling swings-just to get to school.” A festive celebration of formal and informal school settings in India—and of the ways children get to them—this book also reminds us that, while millions of children do get to go to school each day, millions of others don’t.
Published by Shakti for Children (now Global Fund for Children Books) in partnership with Charlesbridge, Going to School in India (2005) is written by Lisa Heydlauff, with photos by Nitin Upadhye, and designed by B.M. Kamath. Royalties from the sale of the book support educational initiatives in India. Click here to learn more about author Lisa Heydlauff’s projects and her Going to School non-profit.
On a related note, in her 2009 interview for PaperTigers, Maya Ajmera, founder and president of the Global Fund for Children talked about the “moment of obligation” she experienced, over 20 years ago, when she stepped out onto a bustling train platform in India and came across an open-air classroom where children were being taught how to read and write—a moment that led her to start The Global Fund for Children. This anecdote illustrates what our Pacific Rim Voices executive director, Peter Coughlan, loves to say: “A ripple can become a tidal wave, an acorn an oak tree.” GFC nowadays reaches millions of children and youth around the world, and supports hundreds of educational projects, including mobile boat schools for children in Bangladesh, night classes for women and girls in the red light districts of India, and countless more.
A ripple can indeed turn into a tidal wave of goodness.
0 Comments on Going to School in India as of 1/1/1900
Today is International Literacy Day, and this year the theme is “Literacy and Women’s Empowerment”—a reminder to us all of the need for increased commitment to literacy, especially for girls and women. This theme reinforces and adds a particular focus to the United Nation’s Literacy Decade efforts to encourage a world-wide commitment to issues of literacy.
One of the multitude of events happening around the world in celebration of the day is the award ceremony for UNESCO 2010 International Literacy Prizes, which recognize innovative approaches to literacy education and is taking place at the organization’s headquarters, in Paris. UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize, sponsored by the Republic of Korea, will be given to projects in Cape Verde and Germany, and programs in Nepal and Egypt will be receiving the UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy, supported by the People’s Republic of China. You can find the complete list of winning projects and honorable mentions here.
Also happening today, following the awards ceremony, is the launch of a very welcome and potentially transformative initiative: the Knowledge and Innovations Network for Literacy (KINL). Created with support from Verizon Foundation and Microsoft, the Network, which will be operational beginning November 1, will work as a virtual workplace where literacy researchers and practitioners can share knowledge and debate literacy topics online, with the goal of generating new ideas and practices.
Let us know how you are celebrating the day at your school, library or household. And keep in mind that, in the US, one way you can show your support for the right to literacy is by signing this declaration. Before delivering it to President Obama, ProLiteracy is sending the declaration scroll around the country to gather signatures from individuals and mayors.
We all deserve a world in which children and adults have the literacy skills they need to lead happy, productive and fulfilling lives, so let’s each do our part—and every little bit counts!— to promote literacy.
You can find PaperTigers’ archived Literacy issue here. To see all our literacy-related blog posts, click on the “World Literacy” category, on the sidebar.
0 Comments on International Literacy Day 2010: Literacy and Women’s Empowerment as of 1/1/1900
If you haven’t read our recent interview with Métis author David Bouchard yet, then head on over there right away! In the interview we talked only a little bit about his recent book Seven Sacred Teachings of White Buffalo Calf Woman (More Than Words, 2009), which he co-wrote with Dr Joseph Martin, is stunningly illustrated by Kristy Cameron, and has an accompanying DVD with music by Swampfox, and for which Swampfox created seven flutes out of seven different woods, each in a different key.
David considers Seven Sacred Teachings to be one of his most important works to date. The seven teachings (Humility, Honesty, Respect, Courage, Wisdom, Truth, and Love) are universal to First Nations peoples, and are the strongest link between First Nation, Inuit and Métis communities. Read on to find out more, for in this post David explains in more depth the background to this fascinating and ambitious project, which brought together six languages: English, French, Ojibwe, South Slavey, Bush Cree and Chipewyan.
The Aboriginal people in Canada have had to deal with many negative experiences over the past century and more: but one of the golden, shiny spots from coast to coast in our country is the spirituality that remains intact. If you go into any one of our schools, any school from coast to coast in Canada with Aboriginal kids, you’ll see posters or writings on the walls that refer to these teachings. Different people call them different things. Among the Ojibwe people they’re called the Grandfather Teachings, amongst the Lakota and Dakota people (who used to be called the Sioux), they’re called the teachings of White Buffalo Calf Woman. Among the Dene of the north and their cousins the Navaho in America, they call them the Dene Laws.
But the teachings are very, very constant and I thought it would be wonderful to take those teachings and express them through art and in different languages in a top-quality book. So I started working on the project a few years ago. At around the same time, I came across a young artist, Kristy Cameron, a Métis of Ojibwe descent. I just loved her art, and I talked to her about doing the book with me.
In our culture, there are seven sacred directions – the four of the medicine wheel (East, South, West and North), and then Up, Down and Within our Hearts. Each direction has a teaching associated with it, a colour that we associate with that teaching, and a trait that we associate with the colour; each direction has an animal or a bird that we think of as being representative of that teaching. So I put all of that together and then I said, “Well, if we’re going to do this, we can’t do it on a cd as a cd’s too small, so we’ll have to do it on dvd. So the dvd has me reading the whole book in English and then in French; then it’s read in Ojibwe, Chipewyan, Swampy Cree and in Slavey. Those were the people I was
0 Comments on Guest Post: David Bouchard on “Seven Sacred Teachings” as of 1/1/1900
Saturday was the deadline for nominations for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (ALMA) 2011. Having barely caught our breath from this year’s announcement of Kitty Crowther as the ALMA winner for 2010, we found ourselves working right up to the mark to get our nominations submitted in time, but in they are and it’s very exciting to be able to share them with you all now, along with our 500-character nomination statements:
Author and illustrator, Allen Say, whom we also nominated last year (and if you haven’t already, do read our interview with Allen and enjoy our Gallery of his work):
Often drawing on his own background, Allen Say captivates his readers through beautifully honed prose and luminous watercolors. He embraces a striving for happiness with a blend of gentle humor and realism, and touches on many aspects of being human, such as race, migration, disability and age. Even young children can empathize with and find echoes in many of his stories. Say opens young hearts and minds both to new cultures and to their own potential; and his portrayal of the human condition provides a forum for children to recognize their own value and to dream.
Author and illustrator, Grace Lin (and don’t miss our interview with Grace, either, or her two Gallery features here and here; and do visit her blog):
Grace Lin is passionate about writing for children. Her child-centred creativity is filled with energy and imbued with core values such as family, friendship, loyalty and love. Her readers respond to the warmth of her stories, whether founded on reality or imagination, and to the charm of her illustrations, which demonstrate a commitment to unobtrusive detail. Often drawing on her Asian American heritage, and with a gift for interweaving old and contemporary elements in her work, Grace is not afraid to step away from tradition to create new, meaningful narrative for today’s children.
And Katha, a “profit-for-all”organisation based in India:
Katha is an Indian non-profit organization working in the areas of literacy and education. Since 1988, it has been successfully promoting the literacy to literature continuum in urban disadvantaged communities across India. Its multi-faceted school and community-based outreach approach, including reading campaigns, the supporting of pavement schools in slum clusters and the translation and publishing of Indian literature, among other initiatives, are playing an essential role in helping create a more literate, less divisive
0 Comments on Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award – PaperTigers’ nominations for 2011… as of 1/1/1900
Today we welcome James Webb to the PaperTigers blog. James works for ShelterBox, a charity based in the UK that delivers survival boxes, each containing a tent and other life-saving equipment, in the immediate aftermath of disasters around the world. The signature green box has become an iconic presence in such situations, with hundreds of thousands of people receiving crucial assistance in many different countries.
This year is ShelterBox’s 10th anniversary: to celebrate they have set up a 10-month Challenge with UK scouts. Little Brother is taking part in this with Cubs and I have got to know much more about the charity, as a Cub Leader. We are hoping to raise enough money to pay for a whole box so that we will be able to track “our” box to its destination…
When James, one of the Scout Challenge coordinators, emailed to say that he was about to leave for Haiti, I asked if he would send us a few words on his return: and I’m so glad he did as I didn’t know about their Classrooms in a Box before. Thank you, James; over to you:
When I was deployed to Haiti in mid April as a ShelterBox Response Team member, I was shocked by the level of destruction still evident in the country over three months after the earthquake devastated the country. Rubble is still everywhere and there are still thousands of people desperately in need of shelter.
While ShelterBox specialise in emergency shelter, we also send Classrooms in a Box which help children continue their education and provide some sort of normality for people who otherwise have lost everything.
In my 12 days in country I visited two schools which were each severely damaged by the earthquake, leaving them dangerous to use. One of these schools was operating from a large tent instead which had very little access to basic materials such as pencils and notepads. We immediately provided the school with another large tent and are planning on giving them a number of children’s packs which will each contain a small blackboard, note pads, crayons, pens, rubbers and a number of other items.
So much has been affected in Haiti but the people’s attitude is still inspiringly positive. Having the opportunity to make a difference by providing shelter and basic materials was a huge privilege and the experience of a lifetime.
The photos show smiling children who have just received the children’s pack – and if you watch this video, you can see what an oasis these packs provide (not to mention the incredible journeys the boxes often go through to reach their destinations). “For children who have lost most, if not all, their possessions, these small gifts are treasured.”
Other great ways to get into the Día spirit are to visit Pat Mora’s blog Bookjoy! and also to read Pat’s book Book Fiesta! Celebrate Children’s Day/Book Day: Celebremos El día de los niños/El día de los libros. Illustrated by Rafael López and dedicated to the members of REFORMA and ALSC, “who connect children and books,” Book Fiesta! is a vibrant bilingual homage to the importance of reading and books in children’s lives. The book includes a letter from Pat about why she founded El día de los niños/ El día de los libros, and suggestions for celebrating the occasion creatively and with gusto. Read PaperTigers’ review Book Fiestahere.
Interested in learning how you can get a Día celebration organized in your community? Click here for information on upcoming educational sessions such as the one to be held June 28, 2010, during the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. entitled “Día is Diversity in Action”.
0 Comments on El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day) ~ April 30th as of 1/1/1900
Share a Story – Shape a Future’s second annual Literacy Blog Tour started today, and this year’s theme is “It Takes a Village to Raise a Reader.” Now let’s show the world what being a virtual community of book lovers committed to helping kids become hungry readers really means, by joining in the conversation and sharing our personal stories and perspectives!
Today’s Literacy Blog Tour host is Terry Doherty @ Scrub-a-Dub-Tub. For a complete list of hosts and topics, see here. And check these for a taste of some of PaperTigers’ posts on literacy:
Established in 1992 by Nancy Traversy and Tessa Strickland, Barefoot Books is a children’s book publisher based in Bath, UK and Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. It publishes multicultural books that, in addition to providing high-quality content, pay great attention to art and design. One of the company’s core values is to use art and stories “to create deep and lasting connections—whether it’s a child and parent connecting over a book; a child connecting to the universal wisdom of other cultures; or a broad network of people connecting through shared values and the desire to help children become happy, engaged members of a global community.”
PT: How did Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing come about as a project for Barefoot Books?
TS: This project came about in quite a circuitous way. First, I was contacted by Clare Farrow, who wanted to know if I was interested in having her retell any traditional Chinese tales. In the course of our conversation, I learnt that she and her husband, Guo Yue, had just completed a manuscript about his life, Music, Food and Love. It so happened that this telephone conversation came about just as I was starting to cast around for stories for older readers, and I was fascinated by what Clare told me about Yue’s childhood in Beijing. So, I asked to read a copy of the manuscript.
PT: When you acquired the manuscript, did you know from the get go that you would published it as an illustrated middle grade book, or was the decision regarding full plate illustrations made later in the process?
TS: When I read Music, Food and Love (Piatkus, 2006), I thought that the best way to tell Yue’s story to children would be to focus on the summer of 1966. The manuscript went through about four drafts and was a close collaboration between Yue and Clare, me, and an excellent editor, Anne Finnis. The decision to make full-plate illustrations was made once we had a manuscript that everyone was happy with.
PT: What can you tell us about the pairing of Guo Yue and Clare Farrow’s text with Helen Cann’s art?
TS: We have done a number of books with Helen Cann; I knew that she would be a delight to work with. Not only is she very talented, she is also extremely interested in developing her own style and in working
collaboratively. She had some very fruitful meetings and discussions with Clare and Yue, who were both extremely happy with her illustrations.
PT: How do you think the public’s attitude toward multicultural books for children has changed since Barefoot Books was founded, in 1992? Are there any major differences between the US and the UK markets in that regard?
TS: As Barefoot has always focused on multicultural books, it is hard to say with very m
0 Comments on Q&A with Barefoot Books, publisher of “Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing” as of 3/3/2010 4:47:00 AM
, an International Symposium on Translation and Cultural Mediation is happening today and tomorrow at the UNESCO House in Paris, covering themes such as “Bridging Global and Local Languages”, “Translation and Cultural Mediation” and “Translation, Mutual Understanding and Stereotypes”. Information sessions on languages and multilingualism will include one on the New Atlas of Endangered Languages, and a presentation entitled “Technology and the Mother Tongue” Friend or Foe?”.
In her official message as Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova speaks about the importance of language to create inclusion and promote peace:
Languages are the best vehicles of mutual understanding and tolerance. Respect for all languages is a key factor for ensuring peaceful coexistence, without exclusion, of societies and all of
their members.
Multilingualism, the learning of foreign languages and translation are three strategic axes for the language policies of tomorrow. On the occasion of this 11th International Mother Language Day, I am appealing to the international community to give the mother language, in each of these three axes, its rightful, fundamental place, in a spirit of respect and tolerance which paves the way for peace.
As IMLD grows in importance each year, more and more countries organize educational and cultural events, such as Endangered Languages Week, in the UK. Another example of a country that is embracing IMLD’s goals is Serbia, which, according to UNESCO’s website, will be marking the occasion this week by devoting one lesson in every school to mother languages.
For an an overview of UNESCO’s work on languages in all its areas of competencies, click here.
0 Comments on 11th International Mother Language Day as of 1/1/1900
Founded in 1975, Children’s Book Press is a nonprofit independent publisher of multicultural and bilingual literature by and about people from the Latino, African American, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native American communities. Their stories promote “lived and shared experiences of cultures who have been historically under-represented or misrepresented in children’s literature while also focusing on promoting inter-cultural and cross-cultural awareness for children of all backgrounds.”
Children’s Book Press is the publisher of The Storyteller’s Candle, one of the seven books selected for inclusion in our Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set Donation Project. Dana Goldberg, Executive Editor, answered my questions about the book and other topics related to multicultural children’s literature:
AP: How did The Storyteller’s Candle come about as a project for Children’s Book Press?
DG: Our former Executive Director approached Lucía Gonzalez at a conference, and they got to talking about Pura Belpré. The idea to do a book with Lucía about Pura came from that meeting.
AP: When you acquired Lucia’s manuscript, did you expect the book to be as successful as it’s turned out to be?
DG: We did have high expectations for the book. The manuscript was just perfect — Lucía is a master storyteller, so we knew the book would be reviewed favorably in that respect. We knew there would be significant interest on the part of librarians everywhere, and from the Latino community in general. Pura was so influential to so many people, to so many generations of children. From the very beginning we had an inkling we had a hit on our hands.
AP: Did you consider other illustrators for the book, or was Lulu Delacre the most natural choice? What can you tell us about the pairing up of Lucia’s work with Lulu’s art?
DG: It was Lucía’s idea to approach Lulu, since the two of them had worked together before on the The Bossy Gallito and Senor Cat’s Romance and Other Favorite Stories from Latin America. It seemed very natural to bring those two amazingly talented women together again for this particular book. Pura Belpré was the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York, and Lucía felt very connected to her because she too is a librarian and a storyteller, and Lulu had the connection of being from Puerto Rico and having the firsthand cultural knowledge that goes along with the story.
AP: How do you think the public’s attitude toward multicultural and bilingual books for children has changed since CBP was founded, in 1975?
DG: There’s a much greater acceptance of multicultural and bilingual books among parents, teachers, and librarians. But you still find a lot of resistance (or ignorance) among some booksellers who don’t know what to do with those books, or how to categorize them or where to display them in their stores. For example, instead of putting our books in the children’s section, some stores put them in the foreign language section. And in some academic circles there is debate over whether bilingual books help or hinder children learning English as a second language. But we’ve heard very positive things from teachers who work with ESL/ELL populations; they love our books because it’s like getting two books in one. I al
0 Comments on Q&A with Children’s Book Press, publisher of “The Storyteller’s Candle” as of 1/1/1900
On Friday, November 6, the Washington Office of the International Reading Association hosted a program titled “Learning Through Reading: Two Innovative Programs Give Students Broader Worldviews.” IRA’s Director of International Development, Sakil Malik, described “Reading Across Continents,” a program that links students in Washington, DC, Ghana, and Nigeria through young adult literature.
Author Katie Smith Milway talked about how her popular book, One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference, and its accompanying website have spawned curriculum units and student projects focusing on philanthropy and microentrepreneurship.
Following the program, Reading Today taped a podcast interview with Milway. To hear it, visit the podcast page on the IRA website.
Last week we announced our Spirit of PaperTigers Project, an initiative of Pacific Rim Voices, whose aim is to promote literacy while raising awareness of our common humanity. The idea is to donate 100 book sets of seven carefully selected multicultural books to libraries and schools in areas of need across the globe. Katie’s book One Hen is included in the set along with these other titles. To read more about the Spirit of PaperTigers Project click here and be sure to check out Sally’s article Choosing the 2010 Book Set.
0 Comments on Podcast Features One Hen author Katie Smith Milway as of 2/10/2010 2:14:00 AM
Everyone at PaperTigers is excited about our new Spirit of PaperTigers project which involves the donation of a book set to children in schools and through libraries all over the world. Such excitement is infectious and as a result of our launch of this new project, we have received news of many other similar projects. One such project is Big Brother Mouse based in Laos. Janet Brown, a former contributor to PaperTigers, wrote a wonderful post on Big Brother Mouse last year. Do check it out!
0 Comments on Big Brother Mouse: Literacy Project in Laos as of 1/1/1900