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Over a year ago now, I blogged about the beautiful poem Outback written by the then eight-year-old Annaliese Porter and published by Magabala Books in Australia, in a stunning edition illustrated by renowned artist Bronwyn Bancroft. I recently lent our copy of Outback to a friend to use with her class of eight-year-olds here in the UK, when they were learning about aboriginal art, and it was an eye-opening experience for them to work with a book written by someone their own age.

Now Magabala have done it again - they recently published Joshua and the Two Crabs by Joshua Button, “a young man with a keen interest in the saltwater country he has grown up in”.

It’s a delightful story, told with humour, as Joshua chases the two crabs around the beach, telling them,

‘I can see you two!’
‘Well, we can see you too,’ said the crabs.

The three-fold repetition of this satisfying formula perhaps lulls young readers/ listeners into a false sense of this being a wholly imaginary, anthropomorphised tale - so it comes as a bit of a shock when Joshua catches them and then throws them onto the fire to cook for lunch! However, Joshua’s matter-of-fact tone is quite in keeping with the descriptive narrative… I would say the story is a perfect example of a child’s ability to weave fact and fiction together in one breath. We adults sometimes walk a tightrope here. How often have you found yourself in a no-win situation? Either you go along with the imaginings and are berated for saying something which is obviously not true, or you are likewise reproached for throwing in the cold water of fact! Well, Joshua Button seems to have got the blend just right, judging by Little Brother’s reaction.

He was chuckling for a long time that Joshua carried a bucket and spear at the beach - and he loved the pictures - he liked the textures and layering. They are indeed stunning - the colors bring the sea and the creek alive; the crabs are wonderful, as are the vignettes of the waders - and I especially loved Joshua peering down at the crabs in his very goggly goggles!

A while after reading it together, it bcame apparent that Little Brother had been mulling it over:

“Joshua Button does exist.”
“Yes, he does.”
“Do you think this is a true story?
“Yes, I do.”
“But the bit about talking crabs is fiction.”
“Probably.”
“Well, it could say that”
“But it’s a story - fundamentally it’s a story, isn’t it?
“Well, it did happen. It’s a story about two crabs.”

…and he is now thinking about writing his own book. In my post yesterday, I quoted Jarrett Krosoczka and the effect on him of a comment from a visiting author to his school - how much more aspirational then to read a book in print that is written by someone your own age! Not only has Joshua Button given children all over the world the opportunity to find out about a a fun family day out in his corner of Australia, he has opened them to the possibility that they could do it too. Thank you, Magabala Books!

Sally sent the link to this new video to us all by email - it made me laugh so much, I just had to try and put it onto the blog. I say try because I’ve never uploaded a video before but here goes…

BOOK BY BOOK: the making of a monkey man from Jarrett Krosoczka on Vimeo.

How exciting - hooray, it’s worked!

I love the way video is becoming more and more a way to promote new books: all these wonderfully imaginative authors create some pretty wonderful footage - and this has to be one of the best yet! It’s actually a spoof documentary made by picture-book writer Jarrett Krosoczka. There are lots of other authors/ illustrators in it and they must have had a lot of fun making it - spot the Blue Rose Girls, and the reference to Fuse #8, high in the celebrity stakes!

Jarrett unveiled it last week at the US SCBWI conference in New York, where he gave the opening address. In his blog posting about it he makes this very thought-provoking observation:

I was excited to hear Mr. Gantos speak. I would say I’ve never seen him speak, but that wouldn’t be a complete truth. I saw him speak when I was in the 3rd grade. He visited my school and I remember this clearly - he walked by my desk, pointed to my drawing of Rotten Ralph and said, “nice cat”. That had a profound impact on me.

Cloudscome has already picked it up, and she got it from Miss Rumphius Effect, who challenges us to name everybody before the credits roll…

I’m not sure this is quite the thing for those kids of an age to be reading the book, though - the irony was a bit wasted on my two and they were more inclined to take the whole thing literally… But silly me, of course Jon Sczieska pretends to be an answer phone whenever he doesn’t want to speak to someone!

In a world where language conveys powerful messages about attitudes and values, what better moment to introduce its many “looks and sounds” than the nursery years? My Village: Rhymes from Around the World (Gecko Press, 2008), collected by New Zealander Danielle Wright and illustrated by British artist Mique Moriuchi, does exactly that: it brings together, in a beautiful multilingual volume, an array of nursery rhymes that introduces children to the languages and cultures of 22 countries. In addition, My Village perfectly communicates the potential rhymes have of becoming “companions for life”—something alluded to by Children’s Poet Laureate Michael Rosen in his beautiful introduction to the book.

Wright’s website, It’s a Small World, offers more about the core idea behind the book. “I wanted a way to introduce different cultures to children right from the nursery“, she says. “Imagine life without world music or ethnic food - that’s what a child’s reading life would be like without international kid’s books and poems… In our grandparents generation eating ethnic food was not commonplace; now their great grandchildren live with many cultural influences outside their own and sometimes many cultural influences inside the one home. Feeding a child rich language from other cultures is a good way to help him/her grow up culturally sensitive.” The website also includes a page on the history of nursery rhymes and a map of endangered languages which points to a scary fact: within the space of a few generations more than half of the 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world may disappear, “consigning whole cultural perspectives and histories to silence.”

Ethnographer Wade Davis has a beautiful definition of language, that gives us much to think about:

Language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules – language is a flash of the human spirit. It’s the vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought and an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.

Published in 2008, UNESCO’s International Year of Languages, My Village: Rhymes from Around the World is a commendable effort to introduce children to the joys of rhymes and to our world’s rich—and fragile— tapestry of languages. Here’s to hoping all our 7,000 languages will continue to exist for millenia to come.

On Dec. 30, the Governor General of Canada announced 60 new appointments to the Order of Canada, Canada’s highest civilian honor. Established in 1967, the Order of Canada is the centrepiece of Canada’s honours system and recognizes a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation. I was thrilled to hear that Canadian author and literacy advocate, David Bouchard was named as “Member of the Order of Canada for his contributions as an author of children’s books and an advocate who has championed the cause of reading and writing, and who has shared his pride as a member of the Métis community through his stories.”

A former teacher and principal, Bouchard is British Columbia’s best-selling author and single most sought-after public speaker. He has written over 25 best-selling children’s books which have won several prestigious awards, among them: the Governor General’s Award for The Song Within My Heart, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award for Voices from the Wild, the Red Cedar Award for The Great Race and the Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Award for Illustration for The Dragon New Year. His books have also been short-listed many times for Canada’s most illustrious awards.

Each year David Bouchard travels extensively, championing the cause of literacy to students, parents and educators. During these events, Bouchard shares his perspective: “We do not need new curriculum or harder working teachers in order to get our students to read. We need parents, teachers and administrators who read. The key lies in modeling.” He outlines respective roles and responsibilities that will ensure that all children are given the gift of reading. He inspires and leaves his listeners with a concrete plan and the rejuvenation needed to face literacy issues head on.

“The greatest gift we can give our children is the gift of reading. There is no magic in giving it. There is no toy or program that will do the job for us. It takes time, commitment and most of all, fire. We cannot hope to light a fire in the hearts of others without a fire burning in our own. Light and stoke yours, then spread the flame fast and furious. Let literacy be your legacy.” says David.

On Jan. 21st David will be the keynote speaker for Literiffic Day at my son’s school, an event which I am looking forward to attending!

We have just broken up from school for the holidays and our thoughts are turned towards Christmas next week. As well as reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol together for the first time, which we all greatly enjoyed, we have been reading other stories with a Christmas setting, including two multicultural versions of the Nativity story, the birth of Jesus.

The first is The Road to Bethlehem: A Nativity Story from Ethiopia told by Elizabeth Laird (Collins, 1987). Elizabeth Laird has spent a lot of time in Ethiopia gathering stories from the oral tradition and her writing here certainly asks to be read aloud - not only is the story told simply with plenty of direct speech to bring it alive, but for those children who are familiar with the story from their own traditions, there is likely to be a good deal of intrigued discussion in which the differences are explored, including new characters and miracles.

The illustrations too are full of extra fascinating details - their vibrancy and appeal to young listeners/readers make it hard to take on board that they are taken from 200-year-old Ethiopian manuscripts in the British Library! Laird has added fascinating notes to each picture, which can be dipped into alongside reading the text - one Older Brother was particulary struck by was an episode on the Flight into Egypt showing arrowheads sticking out of the road to stop them: “but Mary took the hand of her Child, and walked through unharmed.”

The second book is one I blogged about last year but didn’t actually manage to share with my boys - however, we have now read together Ian Wallace’s beautifully illustrated version of The Huron Carol (Groundwood, 2006), based on an English translation of the Christmas carol written by a French Jesuit missionary, Father Jean de Brébeuf, for the Huron people in the 1600s. After reading through the first verse together line by line with its double-page-spread illustration, showing the people, landscapes and fauna of its Canadian roots, we have really enjoyed singing the whole carol from the music and words given at the end - in the original Huron, in French and in English. As we have pored over the familiar characters of the story in an unfamilar setting, and the baby Jesus wrapped in fur, surrounded by wolves and beavers, we have explored the reasons that the carol came into being.

We have all enjoyed sharing these books together - and any misgivings I might have had about confusing them with the different versions of what is to them a familiar story have been allayed - on the contrary, I believe their experience of the Christmas story has been enriched by them.

In her recent interview with PaperTigers, Deborah Ellis talked about the background to her most recent book, Off to War: Voices of Soldiers’ Children. This is a very thought-provoking book for children aged 9+ about the effects on the children left behind of having parents fighting overseas. In a way, these are children whose day-to-day existence is not outwardly affected by conflict and yet on whose lives the consequences of war can and often do have a profound effect.

A book I have read again recently to my children is Milly Lee’s Nim and the War Effort, illustrated by Yangsook Choi (Sunburst/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). Set in San Francisco during the Second World War, it tells the story of Nim, a little girl who is intent on beating her arch enemy, Garland Stephenson, an unprincipled bully, from winning the school drive to collect old newspapers “for the war effort”. She strikes lucky when she is offered a garage piled high with bundles of newspapers and resourcefully calls the police to help her to get them to the school in time…

Nim’s rather strict upbringing is ostensibly unaffected by the fact that the Second World War is going on – but it pervades her life nevertheless. Her grandfather wears a lapel pin of crossed American and Chinese flags; and she is fully aware of what certain symbols around her mean – like a gold star on a white background in a front window, to show that “the family who lived there had lost someone in the war”. At the same time, their deeper significance is perhaps lost on her. She is too young to understand that the lapel pin is there to protect her family from the prejudice against Americans of Japanese ethnicity at that time; nor what the emotional impact of losing a loved one in a war overseas actually means. However, it is also these details that give the story a depth and a historical validity: and indeed, in an interview with PaperTigers, Milly Lee told us that, apart from slightly changing her rival’s name, this is a true story. Her grandfather received several phone-calls telling him that his grand-daughter was in the back of a police car, which must have caused more than a little concern, but for Milly:

Oh yes, the ride in the police paddy wagon was wonderful, exhilarating, jubilant, a thrill, and probably the best ride I’ve ever had - and I’ve been on many different kinds of rides since then: yak, elephant, dogsled, tundra-buggy, rafts, and camel!

I can just imagine! And I particularly like the ending, where Grandfather reminds Nim to “Be gracious in your moment of triumph” – and she places her last newspaper on Garland’s stack then “looked over her shoulder and flashed Grandfather an impish grin” – feisty!

This is a beautifully crafted story – and a beautifully illustrated one – which not only leaves young listeners cheering that Nim won the day but gives much pause for thought about racial prejudice and bullying.

In the next couple of months we are going to see three theatre productions all based on classic stories – The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Being a purist in these matters, I resolved that we would have to read the books together first…

Having just read the last three chapters of Treasure Island literally today, we will be starting A Christmas Carol this week, so I’ll report back on that one. It’s a story I’ve read several times myself and we’re looking forward to sharing it with our boys; and my mother has given us the audio-book too, read by Miriam Margoyles…

The other two were unknown entities. Of course I knew of them but I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I hadn’t actually read either of these classics before… but at the same time, it’s meant that our discussions of the book have been very much from the same stand-point: what’s going to happen next? Why did they do that? Can we have just one more chapter, pleeeease?

Both books are narrated in the first person. The language at times can be challenging to a modern reader but in both instances, the plot is so exciting and the descriptions so full and vivid that it’s worth the effort. I have to say, when we started The Prisoner of Zenda, I did wonder if I’d made a mistake: the beginning seemed turgid and the wit slightly precious: but the excitement built up so quickly that in fact I was being presented with the book for a book session at all hours, not just bedtime. By having them read aloud to them, children don’t get hung up on the difficult words anyway. We’ve learnt lots about the parts of castles and ships – but that wasn’t what it was all about; that’s just a side-line. What we’ve had are two great stories. Little brother’s “Wicked!” to describe The Prisoner of Zenda might not have been fully understood by Anthony Hope, but he can take it as a complement!

These stories are perhaps not what we would term multicultural but they do all espouse a strong line on tolerance and understanding, and doing what is right. They put across notions of right and wrong without preaching and without over-simplifying any issues involved – Long John Silver and Ben Gunn of Treasure Island are complex characters; Rudolf Rassendyll, the true hero of The Prisoner of Zenda has to make some pretty tough decisions against himself in order to maintain the status quo.

We have more than enjoyed reading these books together and it is not difficult to understand how they have stood the test of time. There are classics in every culture: which classics from your culture are you reading to your children?

In 1995 the Texas State University College of Education honored distinguished alumnus Dr. Tomas Rivera, by developing the Tomas Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award. This award honors authors and illustrators who create literature that depicts the Mexican American experience. It helps keep alive Dr. Rivera’s legacy in literature and works towards sustaining the vision he saw for the education of Mexican Americans in the United States. In addition it raises conscious awareness among parents, teachers, and librarians of this distinguished literature so these books can inspire, entertain, and educate all children both at home and at school.

The 2008 winner of the award is Los Gatos Black on Halloween by Marisa Montes and illustrated by Yuyi Morales. Written for children in grades K -5, Montes weaves Spanish words into the rhyming text and tells the story of black cats, witches, skeletons and other spooky creatures that march to a haunted casa on Halloween night. Once there the creatures enjoy a fiesta with music and dancing until there is a “RAP! RAP! RAP!” at the door. This causes the frightened spooks to hide, for “The thing that monsters most abhor/Are human niños at the door! Of all the horrors they have seen/ The WORST are kids on Halloween!”

Marisa and Yuyi were kept busy last week with Tomas Rivera Book Award ceremonies and book signings! On Thursday, October 30th, they were honored at a special luncheon held at the university president’s home where they received their award prize and plaque. Later in the day, accompanied by a mariachi band, they attended the Author/Illustrator Presentation on campus.

The next day, as part of the Texas Book Festival Reading Rock Stars Program, the Tomás Rivera Committee selected a public school in Austin and bought every student a copy of Los Gatos Black on Halloween with the award seal on the cover. Yuyi and Marisa did a presentation at the school and the students were thrilled to get their books signed.

The whirlwind weekend of festivities continued on Nov 1st, when Montes and Morales participated in the Texas Book Festival by giving the Tomás Rivera Award reading session and then signing books for festival attendees. Click here to watch it on Youtube !

PaperTigers will continue to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month until mid November.

The October Carnival of Children’s Literature is in full swing with the theme of Snuggle Up with a Children’s Book (great advice for any month of the year!) at The Well-Read Child, where Amy from Kids Love Learning tells How to Create a “Book Addict”, Heather at Age 30+…A Lifetime of Books reports on her Mom and Son Book Club, and Megan reviews Hip Hop Speaks to Children by Nikki Giovanni at Read, Read, Read. Our PaperTigers blog has joined in the fun with Marjorie’s Books at Bedtime discussion of Fiesta Femenina.

Be sure to go to the Carnival, which next month will feature The Gift of Reading and will be hosted by Mommy’s Favorite Children’s Books.

PaperTigers’ current Book of the Month, Alfredito Flies Home by Jorge Argueta and illustrated by Luis Garay (Groundwood 2007) is the story of Alfredito and his family’s return to El Salvador for the first time in four years, since arriving as refugees in San Francisco. The writing bubbles over with happiness and excitement as readers/listeners are carried along by Alfredito’s narration of events – the preparation, the flight and the hectic, happy holiday itself.

This opens the way for young readers/listeners to empathise with Alfredito’s experiences, even if they have never been in his situation themselves. They will then also be able to engage with those other moments which give pause for thought: such as the allusion to the family’s original journey to America under the guidance of “Señor Coyote”; the visit to his grandparents’ graves; or the underlying reality of separation, with some family in America, some in El Salvador.

For children who have parallel experiences to Alfredito’s, on the other hand, Alfredito’s story is invaluable: as Debbie of American Indians in Children’s Literature pointed out in her review.

Luis Garay’s sensitively attuned illustrations make this book extra special and provide plenty of details both within and outside the narrative – so there’s a lot to discuss. I would recommend this book be shared at least the first time children are introduced to it – not only because its tone so lends itself to being read aloud but also because of the discussion and/or questions it will provoke.

As the nights start to draw in at bedtime here in the North of England, we start to long for a bit of color – and we have two bilingual English/Spanish books to hand at the moment, both of which we recently reviewed on PaperTigers - De Colores: Bright with Colors, a traditional Spanish song illustrated brightly indeed by David Diaz, who is currently one of our featured artists (Marshall Cavendish, 2008); and Colors! ¡Colores!, by Jorge Luján, and exquisitely illustrated by Piet Grobler, (Groundwood Books, 2008).

We haven’t sung De Colores yet but I’m sure we will and meanwhile, the words and pictures are as warm and bright as the music will be.

And we have all fallen in love with Jorge Luján’s whimsical poem, which is definitely to be savoured and re-read – even at the same sitting. It makes a lovely, gentle bed-time read and sends the imagination floating away towards the land of dreams. Jorge, let us know if it is ever turned into a video like Tarde de invierno / Winter Afternoon!