Materials from Korea
Bee-bim bop is a traditional Korean dish of rice mixed with meat and vegetables. In bouncy rhyming text, a hungry child tells about helping her mother make bee-bim bop: shopping, preparing ingredients, setting the table, and finally sitting down with her family to enjoy a favorite meal. The energy and enthusiasm of the young narrator are conveyed in the whimsical illustrations, which bring details from the artist’s childhood in Korea to his depiction of a modern Korean American family.
A mama duck with a dozen eggs has to do a lot of counting! Mama counts her ducklings one by one as they hatch, but soon she finds clever new ways to count to twelve–by twos, threes, fours, and sixes! But how many ducklings will it take to trick the hungry wolf who is counting on them for lunch?
On the first day of kindergarten, a teacher asks the boys and girls to line up, and Yoon lines up with the other girls. But when some children mistake Yoon for a boy because of her short hair, Yoon bursts into tears. At home, Yoon finds a solution. Her sister s special headband is perfect! When she wears it to kindergarten, no one teases or mistakes her for anything but who she is! Yoon has a lovely time with her new friends.But Yoon’s sister has been missing her special headband so when Yoon has to go back to school without it, she s worried all over again. Thankfully, her friends like Yoon exactly the way she is.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume 4, Issue 1
“You have to be patient; beauty takes time.”While Minji’s mother visits her local salon, Minji creates a world of beauty all her own.An ode to the power of children’s imagination (and their parents’ patience), Minji’s Salon reminds readers that creativity and play are worldwide phenomena.
A sijo, a traditional Korean verse form, has a fixed number of stressed syllables and a humorous or ironic twist at the end. Like haiku, sijo are brief and accessible, and the witty last line winds up each poem with a surprise. The verses in this book illuminate funny, unexpected, amazing aspects of the everyday–of breakfast, thunder and lightning, houseplants, tennis, freshly laundered socks.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume VII, Issue 2
When a baby sister comes along, it seems she is just too little for anything! Will she ever be big enough to play? To whisper secrets? To eat kimchee? Will she always lie there? Scream for no reason? Be so helpless and little? When a baby sister is just too little to do anything, what’s her big sister to do but wait and wait and WAIT . . . and dream about what’s to come.
These are the gifts brought across the ocean to Korea: Leather gloves. An apron with pockets like flowers. A book with pictures and simple words. What is given in return? Simple gifts like these–and so much more.
During the seventh-century, the land which is now Korea was fraught with political and religious intrigue. The country was split into Three Kingdoms, each fighting for supremacy: Silla, Koguryo, and Paekche. Besides the warring kingdoms, there are three religions in conflict: Shamanism, the ancient female-dominated faith wherein Shamanist priestesses wield great power at court, foretelling the future, performing important national rituals, and healing sickness; Buddhism, the contemplative State religion; and Confucianism, a recent import from powerful China. Written as a first-person diary, a young princess expresses her frustrations at not being able to study astronomy because she is a girl.
With the Korean numbers one through ten, Jim Haskins introduces young readers to diverse aspects of Korean culture. Describing such things as one ancient building and eight food seasonings, Haskins’s clear text works together with vivid full-color illustrations by Dennis Hockerman to help children explore Korean life.
This tender story was first published in a newspaper in 1938. This tale from Korea is universal–a small child waits for Mama at the station, asking the conductor if he has seen her. The conductor hasn’t, but cautions the child to wait a little farther from the tracks. It is cold and snowy but the child waits patiently until finally Mama comes.
It is an English-Korean bilingual picture book. The Korean edition book is also available.