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It’s been a busy month here at PaperTigers with our 10th Anniversary celebrations in full swing as well as receiving lots of feedback  from recepeints involved in our WaterBridge Outreach: Books + Water Nourishing the Mind and Body (formerly known as Spirit of PaperTigers). It’s always exciting to receive a package in the mail or open an email and see images of students involved with the Book Sets and to read their thoughts and comments on the books.

Today we are highlighting feedback from Talisay Elementary School. Talisay Elementary School is located in a barrio in Barangay Talisay in the Northern Mindanao Area of the Philippines. A significant number of students at this school have parents who are unemployed and the school’s mission is to provide “the best quality education to everyone who enters the gates.”  Talisay has participated in our Outreach program for the past two years and when reflecting on the 2011 Book Set, teacher Brenda Abao commented:

When my pupils saw the pictures in the books, they were so attracted with the color presentation. Some laughed at the illustrations. Most of them enjoyed best the story Biblioburro.

The books you sent me were a big help in my class especially during the “DEAR” (Drop Everything And Read) period. The students took turns reading since I had 29 pupils and there were only 15 books. They felt for the children in the countries mentioned in the stories but they couldn’t search for more about these countries since only a few of them have access to the internet.

After all of my pupils were able to read the 3 stories, I discussed each story with the whole class. One pupil commented that they were so lucky since their schools are not made of mud and that they do not need to build their school every year. That’s after we talked about the story Rain School.

To read all the feedback from Talisay School and to see more photos click here. To learn more about the 2012 Book Set, click here.

Mount View School, administered by Mr Hotoshe Sema, is a Nursery to Class 10 school located in rural Suruhuto, in Nagaland, India. This school has participated in our Waterbridge  Outreach: Books + Water project for the past two year and we recently received students and administrators reactions on the 2011 Book Set.  Here is a brief selection , click here to read all.

Selected students’ feedback:

P:  Rain School – This is the first time I have heard of students and teachers building a school and I admire they way they did it. The language is quite simple and easy to understand. The main character Thomas’s eagerness to learn and read and his aim to have a new school was very inspiring as he had many obstacles but succeeded in overcoming all these with great determination.

A: Biblioburro – Through this book I come to know that without education, even a rich man is nothing. This is a good lesson for me in life”.

K: A Child’s Garden teaches us not to give up in anything, especially when it is for good.

Selected teachers’ feedback:

Mr. Mughaka:
Biblioburro - Pleasant and inspiring, with sweet, little pictures.
Rain School – Rumford’s Rain School is an encouraging story which will bring smiles to the readers and listeners. Appropriate for kids of any age.
A Child’s Garden – It is a heartening story. It reminds us that hope and determination, and even little things, can do wonders.

Mr. Abenito:
A Child’s Garden – An appreciable illustration about a never ending (undying) hope and concern for that which matures in a person’s mind and soul for a better living and freedom.
Biblioburro – An inspiring and well illustrated story that imparts the significance an individual can play through books.
Rain School – Rumford’s depictions emphasizing a teacher in inspiring and molding a child are quite amazing and interesting.

New on our Outreach site….photos from Pingliang Road No. 3 Elementary School in Shanghai, China. This school has participated in our Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set project for the past two years. Their latest feedback consists of photos of students’ work based on books in the 2011 Book Set:  A Child’s Garden: A Story of Hope, written and illustrated by Michael Foreman; Rain School, written and illustrated by James Rumford; and Biblioburro, written and illustrated by Jeanette Winter.

Here’s a sneak peek…..click here to see all the photos.

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Agape School has participated in our Spirit of PaperTigers Outreach Program for the past two years and recently sent us their feedback (including some lovely photos!) on the 2011 Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set which was comprised of the following three books:

A Child’s Garden: A Story of Hope, written and illustrated by Michael Foreman (Walker Books/Candlewick Press, 2009)

Rain School, written and illustrated by James Rumford (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2010)

 Biblioburro, written and illustrated by Jeanette Winter (Beach Lane Books, 2010)

Agape School was established by Lipichem Sangtam, a former journalist who gave up his career to start his own school, and serves 180 primary students ages 4-11. In his 2011 feedback letter to us, Mr. Sangtam writes:

The students are doing well and have been greatly enriched by the story books that you have sent. The students composed illustrated stories in response to reading the 2011 Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set. The beautiful pictures supporting the stories motivated them and they started small paintings with the few colours they have; and they started displaying in the school campus, which is encouraging. The students enjoy reading the books and the quality of the material, which is excellent.

English teacher Jevili Achumi comments:

The stories are filled with images and fanciful layers of illustration which attract the readers. The children were fascinated with the stories, the fanciful characters and the pictures which really take them to the roots. I also appreciate it if the illustrations and stories end up with a best moral.

Here is a sneak peek of the impressive artwork submitted to us. Do take the time to visit Agape School‘s page on our Spirit of PaperTigers Outreach site to see more photos! Click here to be taken there.

Have you ever stopped to think in all the people that live in a poor country? Well, I was born in a poor country so I know in which conditions people in Chad live. I was born in a place called Cabo Verde, there are 10 islands and they live in poor conditions so I know how those children feel.

Today we read a book about children that live in Chad and it talks about how children in Chad go to school. A child called Thomas was going to his first day of school and he was very ANXIOUS, EXCITED and NERVOUS. When he arrived, there was no school. The teacher was standing there and said ‘Our first lesson is to build our school.‘

Find out more about this AWESOME and INTERESTING book and discover the ending.

I give 10 HUGE stars to this book and I would like to say ‘thank you PAPERTIGERS for giving us this FABULOUS BOOK!’

This wonderful review of Rain School by James Rumford, one of the 2011 Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set, was written by 4th Grader Lucia F. from Woodlands School in Montevideo, Uruguay.

You can read the rest of the school’s Feedback on all three books here…

The Spirit of PaperTigers (SPT) Outreach program seeks to further the overall goals of the PaperTigers Program: bridging cultures and opening minds, promoting greater understanding and empathy among young people from different backgrounds, countries, and ethnicities. More specifically, SPT outreach works to advance education through books and reading, and development through clean and accessible water.

Since 2009, the PaperTigers Program has put books into the hands of young readers through schools and libraries, encouraging literacy, developing understanding and making reading a lifelong habit.  Taking this work a step further, SPT outreach is seeking to ensure that, in areas where there is water stress or water scarcity, the children to whom the books are sent will have access to clean water and good sanitation. The possibility of effective education in certain parts of the world is linked to the basic realities of food and water.  By focusing on books and water together – nourishing both the mind and body – SPT continues to promote literacy and encourage children to become “hungry readers.”   Thus our Outreach motto: “Through Books and Water, Education and Development.”

For more information please head on over to our Spirit of PaperTigers Outreach page and be sure to read the latest feedback (and see photos!)  from Westwood Elementary School in Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada!

Since my last update on this year’s PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge, we have added some great books to our list.

Together, we have read two new autobiographical picture books: Allen Say’s Drawing from Memory (Scholastic, 2011) and Ed Young’s The House Baba Built (Little, Brown and Company, 2011) – both wonderful, and I’m not going to say much more about them here as we will be featuring both of them more fully on PaperTigers soon. Those are our reading-together non-fiction books for the Challenge.

As our local book, we tried reading a book of folk tales from the North York Moors, where we live in the UK, but discovered the stories formed part of a tourist guide, including instructions for getting around… we extracted what we could but it wasn’t a very satisfactory read. It has made us not take beautifully illustrated and retold folk tales for granted!

Older Brother has read Rainbow World: Poems from Many Cultures edited by Bashabi Fraser and Debjani Chatterjee , and illustrated by Kelly Waldek (Hodder Children’s Books, 2003).  He dipped in and out of it through the summer break and we had to renew it from the library several times…

Older Brother has also been totally captivated by A Thousand Cranes: Origami Projects for Peace and Happiness. After reading the story of Sadako for the Reading Challenge way back in its first year, he’s wanted to know how to make the cranes but I have two left hands when it comes to origami – or at least I thought I did, until I received a review copy of A Thousand Cranes from Stone Bridge Press.  Recently revised and expanded from the original book by renowned origami expert Florence Temko, it’s a super little book, with good clear instructions for beginners like us, and giving background about both the offering of a thousand origami cranes as a symbol of longevity, and specifically the story of Sadako and the Thousand Cranes.  Older Brother, now that he is older, enjoyed reading this factual account here, and learning more about the Peace Park in Hiroshima.  He is now determined to make a string of 1,000 cranes himself and send them to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial: full details of how to do this are included in the book.  There are also lots of ideas for other craft projects, though I’m not sure any of us is quite up to making anything like the amazing example shown of pictures made with 1,001 cranes as wedding gifts.  But with such clear instructions, the only difficulty now is choosing which of the 48 pieces of beautiful Japanese chiyogami