Material appropriate for primary age groups
When Saya’s mother is sent to jail as an illegal immigrant, she sends her daughter a cassette tape with a song and a bedtime story, which inspires Saya to write a story of her own–one that just might bring her mother home.
This book has been included in WOW’s Kids Taking Action Booklist. For our current list, visit our Boolist page under Resources in the green navigation bar.
Three children from other countries (Somalia, Guatemala, and Korea) struggle to adjust to their new home and school in the United States.
Mummy Cat prowls his pyramid home, longing for his beloved owner. As he roams the tomb, lavish murals above his head display scenes of the cat with his young Egyptian queen. Hidden hieroglyphs deepen the tale and are explained in an informative author’s note.
The future is often foretold in stories of the past. As families flee the Debaltseve in Eastern Ukraine in 2015, Ken Goodman’s The Smart One: A Grandfather’s Tale takes us back to families fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe at the turn of the Twentieth Century. It is a compelling story of Jewish migration to America, which begins in Smorgon, now in Belarus, a former Soviet Republic, but at the time Smorgon was in Vilnius, a district of Lithuania, and a part of the Russian Empire.
Mia’s abuela has left her sunny house with parrots and palm trees to live with Mia and her parents in the city. The night she arrives, Mia tries to share her favorite book with Abuela before they go to sleep and discovers that Abuela can’t read the words inside. So while they cook, Mia helps Abuela learn English (“Dough. Masa”), and Mia learns some Spanish too, but it’s still hard for Abuela to learn the words she needs to tell Mia all her stories.
They travel mostly on the roof of a train known as The Beast, but the little girl doesn’t know where they are going. She counts the animals by the road, the clouds in the sky, the stars. Sometimes she sees soldiers. She sleeps, dreaming that she is always on the move, although sometimes they are forced to stop and her father has to earn more money before they can continue their journey.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume 8, Issue 3
When Sally pulls a limpet off a rock at the beach, it sticks to her finger – and nothing she, her family or her friends do can unstick it. Sally’s teacher says that limpets live on the same rock for twenty years. So will Sally ever get the limpet off her finger?
Three hilarious stories are told in graphic style in this book destined for multiple readings. The first episode finds the charismatic Boots without a place to nap on his usual wall. A bit of ingenuity and some fish biscuits are all he needs to get some room, though his scheme is certain to backfire. The second chapter has Boots enlisting the duck Madam Quark for swimming and flying lessons, with dubious results. And the pièce de résistance comes last in probably the most hilarious game of charades ever played by cats.
Even though the new baby of Mr. and Mrs. Brains is very intelligent, they realize that he is still just a baby.
A collection of stories each of which portrays a different family in a neighborhood in England. Throughout stories, the delicious, delightful ordinariness of side-by-side day-to-day life is introduced.