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LEE & LOW BOOKS celebrates its 25^th anniversary this year! To recognize how far the company has come, we are featuring one title a week to see how it is being used in classrooms today and hear from the authors and illustrators.

Today, we are celebrating First Day in Grapes, an inspirational story for children of all backgrounds. Chico’s story of personal triumph and bravery in the face of bullying is a testament to the inner strength in us all.

Featured title: First Day in Grapes

Author: L. King Perez

Illustrator: Robert Casilla

Synopsis: All year long Chico and his family move up and down the state of California picking fruits and vegetables. Every September they pick grapes and Chico starts at a new school again. Often other children pick on him — maybe because he is always new or maybe because he speaks Spanish sometimes.

Chico’s first day in third grade turns out to be different. His teacher likes him right away, and she and his classmates are quick to recognize his excellent math skills. He may even get to go to the math fair! When the fourth-grade bullies confront Chico in the lunchroom, he responds wisely with strengths of his own.

Awards and Honors:

• Pura Belpré Illustrator Award Honor, ALSC/REFORMA
• Notable Children’s Book, Smithsonian
• Choices, Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC)

From the Illustrator:

“Stories that help kids become familiar with kids of other cultures or others in different situations are books that I like to illustrate. I appreciate the way the author put the main character in situations that kids deal with daily in real life and how the boy used his wits to get out of tough situations.

I related to the kid in this story in a wacky way when it came to avoiding bullies. When I was about nine years old there was a boy who picked on me daily, until one day I came up with an idea. I thought that if I walked by him making a face that he wouldn’t recognize me and leave me alone. The plan worked, but now that I think of it, I doubt it was because he didn’t recognize me.”

Purchase a copy of First Day in Grapes here.

Other Editions: Did you know that First Day in Grapes also comes in a Spanish edition?

Primer día en las uvas

Resources for teaching with First Day in Grapes: First Day in Grapes Teacher’s Guide

For more titles about different experiences with bullying and peer pressure, check out our Bullying/Anti-Bullying Collection here.

Have you used First Day in Grapes? Let us know!

Celebrate with us! Check out our 25 Years Anniversary Collection.

LEE & LOW BOOKS celebrates its 25^th anniversary this year and to recognize how far the company has come, we are featuring one title a week to see how it is being used in classrooms today as well, as hear from the authors and illustrators.

Featured title: Under the Lemon Moon

Author: Edith Hope Fine

Illustrator: René King Moreno

Synopsis: One night, Rosalinda is awakened by a noise in the garden. When she and her pet hen, Blanca, investigate, they see a man leaving with a large sack-full of fruit from Rosalinda’s beloved lemon tree.

After consulting with family and neighbors about how to save her sick tree, Rosalinda sets out in search of La Anciana, the Old One, the only person who might have a solution to Rosalinda’s predicament. When she finally meets La Anciana, the old woman offers an inventive way for Rosalinda to help her tree–and the Night Man who was driven to steal her lemons.

Awards and Honors:

• Honor Book Award, Society of School Librarians International
• Notable Children’s Book, Smithsonian Magazine
• Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People, National Council for the Social Studies/ Children’s Book Council
• The 50 Best Children’s Books, Parents Magazine
• Parent’s Choice Silver Award, Parent’s Choice Foundation
• Children’s Books Mean Business, Children’s Book Council (CBP)

From the author:

“I can’t help grinning when I look back on my years of Under the Lemon Moon school visits. This book came about from a San Diego news story about a lemon grove that had been vandalized—lemons were taken, trees damaged—a little lemon seed of an idea.

Young readers gasp when I tell them I worked and reworked 42 versions before sending out the manuscript. They brawk like Blanca the chicken, make butterflies with their hands, and echo “Gracias” on cue. They hear, then say, the key opening line, “Deep in the night Rosalinda heard noises,” moving their hands to catch the rhythm of the words. They get their first taste of magical realism as La Anciana helps Rosalinda heal her damaged lemon tree and gain a sense of empathy when learning more about the Night Man.

I’ve now written eighteen books (including Armando and the Blue Tarp School and Snapshots! with Lee & Low) but Lemon Moon, with René King Moreno’s warm illustrations, was my first picture book and has garnered numerous awards. Thanks to my critique group’s patient support, plus Lee & Low’s Spanish translation and attention to back list, Lemon Moon still sells well today. With its subtle theme of sharing and forgiveness, this book still holds a special place in my heart.” –Edith Hope Fine

Resources for teaching with Under the Lemon Moon:

• Under the Lemon Moon Teacher’s Guide
• Dig Deeper: Under the Lemon Moon Activities
• Beyond the Page: Under the Lemon Moon
• What Does Close Reading Look Like in Second Grade?

Book activities:

Olfactory Factory
Lemons have a special scent. Scents can trigger memories from long ago. Choose objects with distinct smells, such as a lemon drop, a flower, a crayon, a Band-aid, a piece of pine, cinnamon, peanut butter on a cracker, etc. Put each object into a separate plastic bag. Choose one bag, without peeking. Now open the bag and waft the scent toward your nose with your hand. (That’s the safe way to pick up scents in the air-you’ll do that in science in high school.) That scent may bring back a strong memory. Write about what you remember.

Bake Lemon Moon Cookies

Ingredients:

• 6 Tablespoons shortening
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3 Tablespoons milk
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 egg
• 3 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1-2 tablespoons “zest” (grated lemon peel; add more if you love the lemony zing)
• 1 capful lemon extract

Preheat over to 375 degrees. Cream shortening and sugar.
Add milk, egg, baking powder, salt, and flour. Mix well.
Add lemon juice and zest. Mix well.
Drop by teaspoonful onto greased cookie sheet, two inches apart.
Bake 10-15 minutes until the cookies are just turning golden.

Under the Lemon Moon is also available in Spanish: Bajo la luna de limón

Have you used Under the Lemon Moon? Let us know!

Celebrate with us! Check out our 25 Years Anniversary Collection

Veronica has a degree from Mount Saint Mary College and joined LEE & LOW in the fall of 2014. She has a background in education and holds a New York State childhood education (1-6) and students with disabilities (1-6) certification. When she’s not wandering around New York City, you can find her hiking with her dog Milo in her hometown in the Hudson Valley, NY.

LEE & LOW BOOKS celebrates its 25^th anniversary this year! To recognize how far the company has come, we are featuring one title a week to see how it is being used in classrooms today and hear from the authors and illustrators.

Featured title: Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree

Author: William Miller

Illustrators: Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu

Synopsis: The true story of the famous African American writer, Zora Neale Hurston, who as a young girl learned about hope and strength from her mother.

Awards and honors:

• Reading Rainbow Selection, PBS Kids
• Choices, Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC)
• Pick of the List, American Bookseller’s Association
• Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People, NCSS/CBC

The story behind the story:

Since 1994, William Miller has published nine picture books with Lee & Low, in addition to several titles with other publishing houses. He made his picture book debut with Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree, which was a “Reading Rainbow” selection, and which Booklist praised as being “lyrically told.”

“I started out as a poet who wrote poems about famous African American writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Frederick Douglass. My high school English teacher, who is also a children’s book author, encouraged me to write a picture book based on my poems. I expanded a poem on Hurston’s life and simplified the language for children. I sent the manuscript out when I felt I had written the best possible, most poetic story I could tell.

I’ve taught African American literature for many years at York College in Pennsylvania. Personally, I am drawn to the themes of struggle, renewal, and celebration in the literature I teach. No matter how many times I teach the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, I find something new, something that inspires me to live my life on a higher level.”

(from an interview with William Miller)

Resources for teaching with Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree:

Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree Teacher’s Guide

Learn more about Zora Hurston:

• Zora Neale Hurston Biography 
• How Zora Neale Hurston Helped Her Readers Understand the World  

 Additional LEE & LOW titles by William Miller:

• The Bus Ride
• Frederick Douglass and the Last Day of Slavery
• A House by the River
• Joe Louis, My Champion
• Night Golf
• The Piano
• Rent Party Jazz
• Richard Wright and the Library Card

 Book activities:

1. Pretend you are Zora’s friend. Write her a letter encouraging her to remember her dreams and to find a way to keep her promise to her mother.
2. After students have read the story, arrange them into groups of four. Explain to them that the members of each group will take turns adding leaves to a “Tree of Dreams.” Provide each group with a large sheet of butcher paper on which you have drawn the outline of a tree. Tell students that they will take turns drawing leaves on the branches of the tree. Inside each leaf, they will each write a dream. The students may take turns until they have run out of ideas or class time. Use the trees as a “Forest of Dreams” to facilitate a discussion of dreams and aspirations. Be sure to display the “Forest of Dreams” in the classroom.

Have you used Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree? Let us know!

Celebrate with us! Check out our 25 Years Anniversary Collection.

LEE & LOW BOOKS celebrates its 25^th anniversary this year! To recognize how far the company has come, we are featuring one title a week to see how it is being used in classrooms today and hear from the authors and illustrators.

Featured title: Baseball Saved Us

Author: Ken Mockizuki

Illustrator: Dom Lee

Synopsis: Shorty, a Japanese-American boy, learns to play baseball when he and his family are forced to live in an internment camp during World War II. Shorty quickly learns that he is playing not only to win, but to gain dignity and self-respect as well. Read The New York Times review and article.

Awards and honors:

• 50 Multicultural Books Every Child Should Know, Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC)
• Not Just for Children Anymore Selections, Children’s Book Council (CBC)
• Parents’ Choice Gold Award
• “Pick of the List,” American Booksellers Association
• Washington State Governor’s Writers Award
• “Choices,” Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC)
• “Close the Book on Hate” Reading List, The Anti-Defamation League
• “Editors’ Choice,” San Francisco Chronicle
• Washington State Children’s Choice Award Finalist
• Best Multicultural Title, “Cuffies Award,” Publishers Weekly

The story behind the story:

“During August 1991, I received my first phone call from Philip Lee, who tells me he has founded a children’s picture book company called Lee & Low Books in New York City. He was searching across the country for authors and illustrators to launch his first set of books, and got my name through his wife Karen Chinn, a former Seattleite and colleague of mine at the International Examiner newspaper. Up to that point, I had never authored anything in the field of children’s literature, but would I be interested in writing a children’s picture book? I remained open to the idea, and Philip sent me an article from an East Coast magazine about Japanese Americans forming baseball teams and playing the sport within the American incarceration camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. A non-fiction story about this subject? he suggested. I decided I wanted to make it historical fiction, and create a young hero who hits not only one home run during a clutch situation, but two!

With good reviews – particularly a write-up in The New York Times Book Review – and over a half million copies of this book later sold, my career began as a children’s book author and presenter.”

—Ken Mochizuki, author of Baseball Saved Us

Resources for teaching with Baseball Saved Us:

• Explore a reading guide and learning activities for Baseball Saved Us from OurStory, a website created by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to encourage adults and children in grades K–4 to read historical fiction and biography together.
• For ideas on how to teach World War II and the roles children can play in solving national problems, check out the NEH lesson series, On the Home Front, featuring Baseball Saved Us from EDSITEment, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) website for K–12 teachers, school librarians, and students.
• Learn about the experiences of children and teens in World War II interment camps with “The Japanese American Internment: How Young People Saw It,” a set of four lesson plans divided into grade bands featuring Baseball Saved Us, produced by the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies.

Book activity:

Have students imagine they are Shorty in the story. Encourage them to write as Shorty a letter to a friend outside the internment camp or a diary entry describing how they feel about being in the camp and what life is like there.

How have you used Baseball Saved Us? Let us know!

Celebrate with us! Check out our 25 Years Anniversary Collection.

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On April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. Now, 25 years later, the current crisis in Fukushima is being called the “worst since Chernobyl.” Will we avoid another disaster? And further more, in another 25 years, how will we feel about nuclear energy?

Below a comprehensive article on Chernobyl by Philip R. Pryde, as it appears in The Oxford Companion to Global Change (Ed. David Cuff & Andrew Goudie). For further reading, I suggest looking to the newly published volume Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know.

The most catastrophic accident ever to occur at a commercial nuclear power plant took place on April 26 , 1986, in northern Ukraine at Chernobyl (Chornobyl’ in Ukrainian). Intense radioactive fallout covered significant portions of several provinces in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Russian Federation, and lesser amounts fell out with precipitation in numerous other European countries. The resultant health and environmental consequences are ongoing, widespread, and serious.

The Chernobyl power station is one of several such complexes built in Ukraine. At the time, it was believed that nuclear energy would entail negligible damage to the environment. Four other large nuclear power complexes have been constructed and Ukraine has a major uranium-mining complex and numerous research facilities.

The Chernobyl reactors utilize a graphite-moderated type of nuclear reactor (Russian acronym, RBMK), with a normal output of 1,000 megawatts. These units are water-cooled and employ graphite rods to control core temperatures. Each reactor houses 1,661 fuel rods that contain mainly uranium-238 plus much smaller amounts of enriched uranium-235. There are several dangers inherent in the design of RBMK-1000 reactors, including the ability of the operators to disengage safety controls, the lack of a containment dome, and the possibility that, at very low power levels, a rapid and uncontrollable increase in heat can occur in the reactor’s core and may result in a catastrophic explosion ( Haynes and Bojcun , 1988 , pp. 2–4).

This was what happened early in the morning of April 26 , 1986. A series of violations of normal safety procedures, committed during a low-power experiment being run on reactor number 4, resulted in a thermal explosion and fire that destroyed the reactor building, exposed the core, and vented vast amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Pieces of the power plant itself were found up to several kilometers from the site of the explosion.

This radiation continued to be released into the atmosphere over a period of nine days, with the prevailing winds carrying the radioactive material initially in a northwesterly direction over northern Europe. The winds later shifted to the northeast, carrying fallout southwestward into central Europe and the Balkan peninsula. The overall result was significant radioactive fallout (mainly associated with rainfall) in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Germany (mainly Bavaria), the United Kingdom, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and Switzerland. Lower levels of radioactive deposition were reported in Denmark, France, the Benelux countries, Greece, Ireland, Norway, Yugoslavia, and several other European nations (Medvedev 1990 , chap. 6). The republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were also directly in the path of the initial plume.

In the Soviet Union, the regions that received the highest levels of radioactive contamination were in the northern Ki