It is April 22, and here in Saint Paul we are in the middle of a snowstorm – we are expected to get 2-4 inches tonight. This is the third snow storm in a week and even Minnesota has had enough. There is a warning …
Bee-Bim Bop! by Linda Sue Park. Bee-Bim Bop! is so cute. The rhymes are fun and rhytmic, and Ho Baek Lee’s illustrations are sweet and playful. The book tells the story of a child and mother preparing bee-bim bop, or bibim bop a Korean dish …
Yesterday I mentioned that I would start featuring good children’s literature featuring non-white protagonists. I’ve been reaching out to all of the mom’s and dad’s of pre-schoolers that I know for Early Childhood books, but I thought that I’d start out with some from my own area of expertise – Upper Elementary and Middle Grades.
The Birchbark House Series follows an Anishinabe (Ojibwe) family over generations from Madeline Island in Lake Superior, across Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota. The books have a fifth or sixth grade reading level and the interest level is Middle Grades.
The main character, Omakayas is a young girl. Erdrich does a fantastic job of describing the ordinary life of this Native family in the middle of the 19th Century, sharing the regular joys and challenges, as well as the unique challenges of the white settlers displacing the Native population in our area.
The tone of these books (even the illustrations) remind me of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books. The books came from Ms. Erdrich and her mother starting to research their own family history.
The series is not done yet. Eventually the series will cover 100 years of the family history. Currently the books cover Omakayas’ childhood and in the fourth book, Chickadee the story centers around her twin sons.
Education Week’s Early Years Blog reports that preschool teachers cannot name books with non-white protagonists, even as 40% of our students are non-white in the United States: A group of more than 100 current and future educators in Shelby County, Tenn., could identify no tales …