Books & Resources

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Part 1 – Discovering the words of Francisco Jiménez

Sandy Kaser, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona

Many teachers look for ways to make books meaningful to students. Sometimes we go about this in a deliberate way. Perhaps we have a unit of study coming up and so we look for books that offer different perspectives on this particular topic, or we have “umbrella” themes that cover an entire year and find books that support students in making connections and asking questions all year. In pulling books, we are careful to have a range that reflects the identities of the students entrusted to us.

But sometimes, we happen across a book that has an unexpected effect for both our students and ourselves. When that happens, we want to climb up on a roof top somewhere and shout, “This one! Read this one!” But then we discover that other folks have been shouting on that roof top and we just didn’t hear it. And we are all the more amazed. How did we miss it? This is what happened in my classroom with the books of Francisco Jiménez, specifically The Circuit, Breaking Through and Reaching Out.
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Visual Symbolism as Meaning-Making

Cheri Anderson, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona

Book Cover for My Little Round HouseThe final book we will share is My Little Round House written and illustrated by Bolormaa Baasansuren with an English adaption by Helen Mixter, published by Groundwood Books, 2009. Boloramaa Baasansuren graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts in Mongolia and also studied children’s book illustration in Italy and Russia. She has won numerous awards including Distinguished Best Book of Mongolia and prizes at the International Competition of Illustration (Teario/UNICEF) for her illustrations in Tales on Horseback, the Grand Prize at the international book competition of the National Cultural Festival in Fukuoka, Japan for The Legend of Wives’ Hair, and The Grand Prize at the Noma Concours for the Japanese edition of My Little Round House. She lives in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Boloramaa Baasansuren’s extensive firsthand knowledge of Mongolian culture radiates throughout her extraordinary illustrations.
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Conveying Meaning through Visual Elements

Cheri Anderson, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona

Book Cover from The Imaginary GardenThis week we want to share the picture book, The Imaginary Garden, written by Andrew Larsen, illustrated by Irene Luxbacher, and published by Kids Can Press, 2009. The author and illustrator are both from Toronto where the illustrator lives in an art-filled apartment, an important context for this Canadian picture book. Reviews of this book need to discuss the use of color and texture as connected to the themes of imagination and relationships.
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Cultural Issues in Reviewing Illustration

Cheri Anderson, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona

Book Cover from Alego

Our focus this week is a picture book from Canada, Alego, written and illustrated by Ningeokuluk Teevee and published by Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, 2009. Ningeokukluk Teevee is an interesting young artist from Kinngait (Cape Dorset), home to the great tradition of Inuit art. The book provides an authentic introduction to the life and world of an Inuit child. Our analysis of the illustrations in this book raises issues about illustration styles that are specific to a particular cultural group and how those styles might be read by viewers outside that cultural tradition.
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Evaluating Illustrations in Reviews of International Picture Books

Cheri Anderson, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona

This July blog highlights the need to include more in depth discussion of the illustrations within picture books in published book reviews. The blog entries will each discuss an award-winning international picture book as an example of the kinds of discussion that should be occurring more frequently in reviews.

Illustrations create a depth of meaning within picture books that are essential to the reading experience for that book. Unfortunately most picture book reviews give only basic information about the illustrations, usually just the medium or technique. Although the medium used by illustrators and the techniques for how they create the art is important, many other visual aspects elements are equally as interesting. The complexity of illustrators’ decisions as they go about their creative processes is fascinating. Some of these decisions are also made by the art directors at the publishing companies. Visual decisions such as the book format, size of the book, font selection, and scale add to meaning making for the reader. Through skillful use of visual elements, such as color, line, space, and perspective, the illustrator engages the emotions of the reader and directs the reader’s attention. Just as important as the written text in establishing authenticity in picture books is a close examination of the illustration style and whether it indicates a particular location of where the story takes place and whether the style and the details in the images are authentic to the culture depicted in the book. Further, the illustrations need to be examined for possible stereotypes or inaccuracies.
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Families Matter: Combining Literacy Reflections – Part IV

By Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, PA

    “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of the world that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange… A window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.” (Rudine Sims Bishop, 1990).

Sharing family stories with children and their families offered eight classroom teachers a window into students’ most powerful literacy environment – their homes. Weekly written conversations in Family Message Journals helped teachers consider the potential for combining home and school literacy communities. In this fourth and final post, I return to our dual goals of valuing families’ life experiences (windows) while also looking outward to the larger world of diverse families (mirrors).
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Families Matter: Expanding Our Community of Readers –- Part II

By Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, PA

This week, we journey inside a third grade classroom to explore how Anne, a Westminster College graduate student, started using Family Message Journals in spring. Her goal focused on developing more dynamic home-school partnerships with students’ families. She first sent home monthly newsletters and home surveys to share her beliefs and gain an understanding of her families’ home interactions. Her rural school in western Pennsylvania consists of families from predominantly lower socioeconomic backgrounds with over half of the children receiving free or reduced lunches.

During weekly after school sessions, Anne and a small group of reluctant third grade readers collectively explored six different family story books and wrote about the books in their journals. Following each session children shared the book and journal with a parent, grandparent, or sibling at home, who then wrote a response in the family journal before sending both back to school.
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Learning About Life Through Others’ Lives, Part 2

by Mary Starrs Armstrong, University of Alaska, Anchorage, AK

Reading biographies, studying the genre while having access to a variety of titles about the same person offers choice as well as opportunities for depth and exploration. Consider Elisabeta, a Mexican American fifth grader who did not see herself as a reader, who expresses surprise at the extent she got hooked on reading about the life and work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo:

I really don’t like [books], but if it’s something really good, if it’s about a person and I’ll want to keep wanting to learn about that person and what else they would do … when we read the biographies, I like had to read them. I picked up a couple of them and like … Frida was one of the ones. At first I read the picture book and it was pretty good, and I found another one of her and I picked it up and read it and kept reading more and more and getting hooked and I didn’t realize it … all of a sudden I was fighting people just to get the Frida books. [I was getting very interested] very. Because I don’t like reading … like her books, I just loved reading them. She would like … she went through so much stuff and life, she still kept going on and going on …Yeah! I got hooked on Frida.

Further, offering biographies of people about whom the readers have never heard fuels curiosity and hopefully, further inquiry. After reading biographies of Elvis and Amelia Earhart, Marianne, a Caucasian third grader found a biography of King Tut (Edwards 2006). She told me:
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Teaching Biography: Learning about Life through Others’ Lives

by Mary Starrs Armstrong, University of Alaska, Anchorage, AK

Harvesting Hope: teaching biography to enrich cultural knowledgeThis month I invite you to explore biographies, focusing on personal response and extensions to culture. In what ways can reading biographies, thinking and writing and talking about them inform us about ourselves as well as other cultures?

Biographies and autobiography have the unique ability to reach into the soil of human experience and till it for the reader (Duthie, 1998) as well as provide a springboard for thought and argument, inquiry and pleasure (Harvey 2002).

Through reading and responding to Harvesting Hope (Krull 2003), Mario made personal connections that evoked memories keeping him focused, interested while expanding his world.

Mario was a Mexican American fifth grader whose first language is Spanish. He quickly found parallels to events in the early life of Cesar Chavez to a few poignant experiences of his own. He told me:
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Living Between Two Cultures: A Digital Literature Discussion of Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez, Part 5

By Andrea García, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, and Carmen Martínez-Roldán, Universtiy of Texas, Austin, TX

Stories, novels, are the truth according to character… you are not talking about the truth universally, you are talking about the particular individual embodiment of different truths. — Julia Alvarez (2009, Radio interview KUER)

Whether multicultural literature is alien or exotic is not inherent in itself, but rather lies in the perception of the reader. From the perspective of marginalized ethnic groups this new category of literature is not alien or exotic at all. Instead, it represents their world, reflecting their images and voices. When it is incorporated into the curriculum, children from these groups find characters with whom to identify in the books they read in school. (Cai, 2002, p. 11)

Graffiti Board response to Return to Sender

In the last decade, much has been written about the multiple and contested meanings of multicultural literature. In particular, scholars focusing on this issue caution that different definitions of what constitutes multicultural education may impact the ways in which this type of literature is used in the classroom. Making a distinction between a pedagogical and a literary definition of multicultural literature, Cai (2002) writes that, “the pedagogical definition of multicultural literature is predicated on the goal that this category of literature is supposed to achieve: Creating a multicultural curriculum and implementing multicultural education” (p. 4). In this respect, multicultural literature has the potential to help expand the curriculum and bring a pluralistic perspective, one that is inclusive and democratic versus exclusive and hegemonic.
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