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17Oct

Protesting

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review
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A couple of new picture books take a look at protesting: how to do it, what forms it can take.

Cover of book shows 4 children holding up a poster with title.

If You’re Going to a March is a how-to book. In fact, for schools that assign kids to try writing how-to texts, this would be a great mentor text. It assumes you’ve found your protest and know what issue you care about and starts right in with instructions about making posters and packing for the protest. Illustrations show three different kids attending a protest, and the text examines issues to think about in getting to the protest, and describes what you might encounter during the protest, including reporters, police assigned to patrol the event, and opposition protesters. The book concludes with the three protesting children going home and climbing into their own beds for the night.

Peaceful Fights for Equal Rights describes a range of actions people take to enact social change. The book is an ABC book, but it never explicitly tells the reader than in either title or text. Instead, it leaves it up to you to uncover the organizational principle. For example, the “B” page reads:

“Make buttons. Make banners. Make bumper stickers. Boycott! Boycott! Boycott!”

I love the art in the book. It’s in bold colors and is made from cut paper.Cover of book shows children of different sizes, genders, and races, marching with signs. The signs form the title of the book: Peaceful fights for equal rights.

These books would pair well with a more traditional picture book biography about protest–Walking in the City with Jane or The Youngest Marcher, for example, or any of the wonderful books profiled on M is for Movement.

If You’re Going to a March by Martha Freeman, illustrated by Violet Kim. Sterling: 2018.

Peaceful Fights for Equal Rights by Rob Sanders, illustrated by Jared Andrew Schorr. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers: 2018.

Picture of children surrounding a globe

Alyson Beecher hosts the Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge at kidlitfrenzy.com. Visit there for more great nonfiction picture books!

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3Oct

Water Land

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review
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I first saw Water Land, pre-publication, at a conference Cover shows a boy pushing a rowboat from the land into the waterwhere both Christy Hale and I were presenting. I was completely dazzled.

The published version is just as wonderful as I had remembered. Hale starts with a simple insight–that both water and land can form analogous shapes. She then uses brilliant book design to connect each land form with an analogous water form. These analogous pairs are shown in paired spreads. The first spread has a single word, describing a landform. A die-cut shows the landform. When you turn the page, the die-cut now shows the analogous water form.

So, for example, the first spread says “Lake,” and has a die-cut circle, showing a blue lake in a landscape. The next spread says “Island,” and now the die-cut, peeking back at the previous page’s land, forms an island in the middle of the blue sea.

Page in book shows a lake in an autumn landscape.

 

 

Book shows a small island in a blue sea

Hale’s illustrations on each page are very kid-friendly. They show children around each geographic feature, and they have lots of tiny jokes on them, just waiting to be found: a shark at a swimming beach, a bear in a pup tent, pirates.

The back matter is on a gatefold page that opens up into a world map many times larger than the book, showing on the map each of the features highlighted in the book. The opposite side of the map includes a more precise definition of each geographic feature and a list of major examples of each.

Water Land: Land and Water Forms Around the World by Christy Hale. Neal Porter Press: 2018.

Picture of children surrounding a globe

Alyson Beecher hosts the Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge at kidlitfrenzy.com. Visit there for more great nonfiction picture books!

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19Sep

On Our Street

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Uncategorized
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Cover of book shows children walking past a homeless man who is panhandling on a street.On Our Street: Our First Talk about Poverty opens by acknowledging that different people live in different ways. Then it invites children to inquire about those differences:

“It’s okay to ask questions when you do not understand the way another person is living.”

Each of the following spreads has a question a child might ask about poverty and homelessness on the left side of the spread, and an answer to the question on the right side. Some of the spreads also have sidebars with definitions, statistics, quotes, or other information related to the answer to the question.

The answers are straightforward and in accessible language. I can’t imagine reading this aloud straight through to a group. It could be a great discussion starter, though, inviting kids to try to answer the questions before reading the book’s answer. I could also imagine an individual child plowing through the book, or an adult using a page here or there to talk about important issues.

The part I loved the most about the book was the illustrations. Every page is illustrated with photographs depicting the problem out in the real world. But along with the photos, every page has ink and watercolor drawings of the children who are grappling with the difficult questions asked. I love that combination of gritty reality and the child’s imagination. I think the illustrations work well to invite young readers to engage with the question.

On Our Street: Our First Talk About Poverty by Dr. Jillian Roberts and Jaime Casp, illustrated by Jane Heinrichs. Orca Books: 2018.

Picture of children surrounding a globe

Alyson Beecher hosts the Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge at kidlitfrenzy.com. Visit there for more great nonfiction picture books!

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12Sep

Expository nonfiction…and fiction

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Uncategorized
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I love narrative nonfiction–those picture book biographies and other accounts that vividly recount important events. My own books so far have been narrative nonfiction. And I know there is a nice subset of kids who love stories like that. But Melissa Stewart has been on a mission recently to remind us that there are other kids who don’t incline toward narrative stories but love expository nonfiction.

My definition of expository nonfiction may be a little different than someone else’s: I think of narrative nonfiction as a book that has, at its heart, an event, while expository nonfiction is a book that is, at heart, about an idea. That doesn’t mean that narrative nonfiction doesn’t grapple with big ideas–it does!–but always in terms of how the event relates to that idea. It also doesn’t mean that expository nonfiction can’t use the same literary devices that we use to talk about things that have happened–tension, setting, even dialogue. But at its heart, expository nonfiction is exploring an idea.

There’s a lot of recent great expository nonfiction centered around animals. But I’ve been trying to dig out expository nonfiction for young children that’s non-animal related. It’s a lot harder to find! Here are three titles. All of them are fiction, but they feel, at heart, like expository rather than narrative texts: they each tell a story but only so that they can use the story to explore an idea.

Cover of book shows three children talking to immigrant children.

 

 

Cover of book shows three immigrant childrenSomeone New by Anne Sibley O’Brien (Charlesbridge: 2018). This book explores the reaction of three children, in three different schools, to a new immigrant classmate. Each story is, in itself narrative–tracing the initial encounter with someone new, the confusion, and then the ultimate way the distance between two people is bridged–but the three stories are intertwined and, together, build an argument: that kids can reach out to new immigrants. This is a companion book to I’m New Here, a book that tells the same story from the immigrants’ point of view.

 

 

Billions of Bricks by Kurt Cyrus (Christy Ottaviano Books: 2018). This rhyming counting book is a non-linear counting book. Instead of 1-2-3, it uses sequences like 2-4-6 or 10-20-30 that then repeat. As the sequences repeat, we watch in the illustrations as an entire city is built on barren land. The central idea of the book is closer to multiplication than to addition: repeat the same sequence over and over, and

you create something huge.

 

Cover of book shows a girl and a robot sunbathing near a sandcastle.How to Code a Sandcastle by Josh Funk (Viking: 2018). On its face, this book is a fictional account of a girl who takes her waterproof computer to the beach. But at its heart, it’s an exploration of three important computer programming concepts: sequences, loops, and if-then-else routines. A helpful back matter explores these ideas in even greater detail.

Picture of children surrounding a globe

Alyson Beecher hosts the Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge at kidlitfrenzy.com. Visit there for more great nonfiction picture books!

 

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