In this gently told picture book, a young girl is unhappy about having to leave the city for a family vacation on the Pacific Ocean (which she used to call the Specific Ocean). As the days pass, however, she is drawn to spend more time in and near the water, feeling moved by its beauty and rhythms. By the end of the vacation, the girl has grown to love the ocean and now feels reluctant to leave it behind. But as she soon realizes, it doesn’t ever have to leave her.
Americas
Materials from the Americas
Look At The Sky
Look at the Sky describes the many moods of the skies, whether delivering blizzard blasts or lightening flashes. A child need only look to the sky to witness storms, thunder, hail, or fog.
Hear The Sea
Hear the Sea depicts the ocean as a majestic force that scatters starfish amongst its shores while making sails dance and changing colors with her mood.
Feel The Wind
Feel the Wind looks at the tricks the wind plays, making turbines spin, bubbles float, and kites soar higher. These three separate picture books are thematically linked, celebrating the wonders of nature that children encounter in their daily lives, but the rhythm of the text and style of the art are unique to each story.
This Is Sadie
Sadie is a little girl with a big imagination. She has been a girl who lived under the sea and a boy raised by wolves. She has had adventures in wonderland and visited the world of fairytales. She whispers to the dresses in her closet and talks to birds in the treetops. She has wings that take her anywhere she wants to go, but that always bring her home again. She likes to make things, boats out of boxes and castles out of cushions. But more than anything Sadie likes stories, because you can make them from nothing at all. For Sadie, the world is so full of wonderful possibilities.
Invisibill
Bill just wanted someone to pass him the potatoes. Unfortunately, no one even noticed, not his mother, a very busy woman with an important job, not his father,a very important man with a busy job, not his very intelligent older brother, not even his very athletic little sister. If someone had noticed, the wonderful, terrible thing that happened might never have happened. But it did.
Mr. Postmouse’s Rounds
Mr. Postmouse has loaded up his wagon and is ready to deliver the mail. From the lofty heights of the Birds’ tree houses to the inky depths of Mrs. Octopus’s ship, the intrepid letter carrier lets nothing stand in the way of his deliveries. This is an introduction to the postal system and an imaginative survey of different types of homes.
When The Slave Esperança Garcia Wrote A Letter
In 1770, the slave Esperança Garcia bravely penned a letter to the governor of Piauí state, in Brazil, describing how she and her children were being mistreated and requesting permission to return to the farm where the rest of her family was living. Before she wrote her letter, Esperança Garcia lived on a cotton farm run by Jesuit priests, where she learned to read and write — a rare opportunity for a woman, especially a slave. But one day, she was separated from her husband and older children and taken with her two little ones to be a cook in the home of Captain Antonio Vieira de Couto, where she and the other slaves were beaten.
What There Is Before There Is Anything There
Every night when his parents turn off the light, strange creatures descend from the black space where the ceiling used to be . . . First comes one, then another, and then more and more. They stand all around him, staring, not saying a word. And then, worst of all, comes the dark, shapeless one that tells him, “I am what’s there before there is anything there . . .”
Salsa: Un poema para cocinar/A Cooking Poem (Bilingual Cooking Poems)
A young boy and his sister gather the ingredients and grind them up in a molcajete, just like their ancestors used to do, singing and dancing all the while. The children imagine that their ingredients are different parts of an orchestra, the tomatoes are bongos and kettledrums, the onion, a maraca, the cloves of garlic, trumpets and the cilantro, the conductor. They chop and then grind these ingredients in the molcajete, along with red chili peppers for the “hotness” that is so delicious, finally adding a squeeze of lime and a sprinkle of salt. When they are finished, their mother warms tortillas and their father lays out plates, as the whole family, including the cat and dog, dance salsa in mouth-watering anticipation.