Materials from Asia
Jasper is a moon bear who was held in a cage by bear farmers in rural China. The farmers extracted the bile from Jasper’s body and sold it to be used in traditional medicines. Despite how badly he was treated, Jasper was able to slowly recover, forgive, and trust humans. With each new bear who arrives in the sanctuary, Jasper becomes a friend, letting them know that they are in a place where healing will begin.
Even though the school children think Gus the dinosaur bus is a great way to get to school, his size is causing some problems for the principle and the town. He causes traffic jams, gets tangled in telephone lines, knocks down traffic lights, and creates potholes with his big stomping feet. The principal fires Gus from school bus duty. However, Gus makes a swimming pool with his tears and finds a new life as the school’s playground, with a swing on his tail and his long neck serving as a slide.
Illustrations: watercolor, childlike pencil drawings
The tiny king lives in a big castle guarded by lots of big soldiers. Every day the tiny king eats dinner at his big table (he can never finish all the food), rides a big white horse (though he is thrown off every time), and takes a bath in his big bath (which is never much fun). And every night he sleeps in his big bed all alone. The tiny king is so sad and so lonely that he never sleeps very well. One day he meets a big princess and asks her to be his queen. Not long after, they are blessed with lots of children. Now the castle no longer felt so big. The children ran around, laughing and playing all day long. Everything is just the right size, bath time is a real riot, and the tiny king sleeps soundly at last.
Bright, bold cutouts and a whimsical use of collage created a witty, heartwarming story.
Orphaned at the age of four when her village in Viet Nam is bombed, Kim is rescued by American soldiers and raised in an orphanage, always finding comfort in her mother’s last words: “Don’t be afraid. I will always be with you.”
A wolf’s attempt to figure out in which of five houses he is most likely to find one of three little pigs introduces such mathematical concepts as combinatorial analysis, permutations, and probabilities.
When each of the umbrellas he brings back to his village disappears, Kiri Mama devises a plan to track down the thief.
Illustrated with rich quilts put together with Indian textiles, this whimsical story in verse is an unusual book of travel-through a child’s imagination. Brilliant nonsense verse and exquisite textile art together plot a blithe, philosophic journey through the surreal mixture of places, people and times that is India.
Neeraj loves to help out when his mom is making his favorite snack–hot, light, puffy chapati–and today she has given him a bit of dough with which to make all kinds of animal shapes and wonder if they will come to life, in a playful story about imagination.
Children in India playfully use their mothers’ beautiful saris as a train, a stage backdrop, a river, a rope, a hiding place, a blanket, or a handkerchief-ultimately, the sari expresses the love of mother and child. Dramatic photographs and acrylics on lightly stylized paper illustrate the simple text. Endpapers demonstrate how to wrap the long sari.
A bilingual retelling of the exploits of the legendary Lord Chom from his secretive chidhood to his rise to power as King Chom.