The Storm

A little boy is excited about a trip to the beach with his parents planned for the following day. But a bad storm is coming, and he has started to worry they won’t be able to go. He watches as the sky grows darker through the afternoon. His mother and father close the shutters and bring the potted plants indoors. Then the storm arrives.

The Storyteller

Long, long ago, like a pearl around a grain of sand, the Kingdom of Morocco formed at the edge of the great, dry Sahara. It had fountains of cool, refreshing water to quench the thirst of the desert, and storytellers to bring the people together.

But as the kingdom grew, the people forgot the dangers of the desert, and they forgot about the storytellers, too. All but one young boy, who came to the Great Square for a drink and found something that quenched his thirst even better: wonderful stories. As he listened to the last storyteller recount the Endless Drought, and the Glorious Blue Water Bird, he discovered the power of a tale well told.

Animal Talk

Animals that live in one country don’t always talk the same language as animals from somewhere else. Take a rooster, for instance. In English-speaking countries, he says cock-a-doodle-doo when he has a notion to announce himself or to greet the dawn. But in Spanish-speaking countries, he says ki-kiri-ki. Emerging readers will delight in identifying the animals depicted on each new page. And the bilingual text invites parent and child into an interactive and playful reading experience for acting out animal sounds in English and Spanish.Craftsman Rubi; Fuentes and Efrai;n Broa from the Mexican state of Oaxaca fill the pages of Animal Talk with vibrant, wildly imaginative figures of familiar animals.Animal Talk is the fifth book in Cynthia Weill’s charming First Concepts in Mexican Folk Art series. It is her passion to promote the work of artisans from around the world through early concept books.