Tag Archives: Children’s Book Press

Mix it up! 15 Books about Kindness and Giving

Today is Mix It Up At Lunch Day, an annual day started by Teaching Tolerance over a decade ago to encourage kindness and reduce prejudice in schools by encouraging students to sit and have lunch with someone new, one day out of the year. Teaching Tolerance offers some great resources to help schools celebrate Mix It Up At Lunch Day, and we thought we’d add our own list of recommended books that encourage kindness, giving, bravery and open-mindedness!

15 Books About Kindness and Giving

  1. Lend a Hand: Poems About Giving written by John Frank and illustrated by London Ladd- A collection of poems showing the many ways individuals can make differences.
  2. Antonio’s Card written by Rigoberto González and illustrated by Cecilia Álvarez – Antonio’s classmates make fun of Leslie, Antonio’s mother’s partner because of her paint-spattered overalls. Antonio decides to make a card for his mother and her partner.
  3. First Come the Zebra by Lynne Barasch –  Abaani, a Maasai boy, sees a Kikuyu boy, Haki, tending a new fruit and vegetable stall alongside the road and they take an immediate dislike to each other.  A short while later, a dangerous situation arises near Haki’s stall and Abaani and Haki must overcome their differences and work together.
  4. King for a Day written by Rukhsana Khan and illustrated by Christiane Krömer – Malik wants to become the king of the kite festival, Basant. Using his kite Falcon, Malik becomes the king of Basant! When he sees a bully take a kite from a girl, Malik uses Falcon to give her a nice surprise.
  5. Continue reading

Book Activities for the Family

amanda_boyarshinovAmanda Boyarshinov is one of the creators of the blog, The Educators’ Spin On It, a site that makes everyday moments into teachable opportunities. She has a Master of Reading Education for grades K-12 and a B.A. in Elementary Education. Additionally, she has her English Speakers of Other Languages (E.S.O.L.) endorsement and has received her National Board Certification in Early Childhood Education. In this post, we’ve been given permission to share her steps on building a family theme Love Book Basket, as well as how to create an “I Love You” book.

HOW TO BUILD A FAMILY THEME LOVE BOOK BASKET

family basket 1

1.  Choose a Book

Select themed literature that is appropriate for your child’s age.  Younger children may enjoy shorter stories.  Older children may like more detailed picture books.  Consider both non-fiction and fiction text. Lee and Low Publishing Company sent me the 3 books to read with my children for this article.  All thoughts and opinions are 100% my own.

Continue reading

Announcing Our Newest Reprints from Children’s Book Press

cbp-logoWe pride ourselves on publishing diverse children’s books that feature characters and cultures from around the world. In 2012, we expanded when we acquired Children’s Book Press, an award-winning multicultural publisher based out of the Bay Area. Our new CBP imprint is a great place to find high-quality bilingual English/Spanish picture books and many more books by talented authors and illustrators of color.

We’re very excited to report that we’ve reprinted several Children’s Book Press titles already under our CBP imprint, and we have more on the way! We know some of you have been waiting quite a while to see your favorite CBP books back in print, so we’re happy to share our most recent reprints:

Animal Poems of the Iguazú/Animalario del Iguazú, by  Francisco X. Alarcón, illustrated by  Maya Christina Gonzalez

Bears Make Rock Soup, by Lise Erdrich, illustrated by Lisa FifieldFrom North to South

Continue reading

Five Favorite Books for Snow Days

We hope you all had a peaceful holiday season filled with delicious food, friends & family, and some quiet time with a good book. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled blogging next week, but meanwhile, they’re forecasting 5-8 inches of snow here in the New York area tonight. Obviously, that means one thing:

Snowball FightSnowball fight!

In preparation, I thought I’d put together a list of my five favorite books to cuddle up with during snow days:

Continue reading

Using Dual Language and Bilingual Books in Third and Fourth Grade

Jill_EisenbergResident Literacy Expert Jill Eisenberg began her career teaching English as a Foreign Language to second through sixth graders in Taiwan as a Fulbright Fellow. She went on to become a literacy teacher for third grade in San Jose, CA as a Teach for America corps member. She is certified in Project Glad instruction to promote English language acquisition and academic achievement. In her column she offers teaching and literacy tips for educators.

Note: This lesson can be done with other books, but dual language/bilingual books offer a unique opportunity to engage non-English speaking parents in the classroom and provide a way to continue rigorous discussions with their children at home regardless of English in the home. Bilingual books additionally underscore the diversity of our classroom communities and equalize parents as teachers in students’ minds.

Using a bilingual book with a Spanish-speaking parent in the classroom is a strategy I learned teaching in San Jose, CA as a part of a parent engagement program called “Los Dichos de la Casa” by Silicon Valley YMCA. Whether your classroom has only a few English Language Learners (ELLs) or a majority, bilingual and dual language books can encourage close reading of a text and increase accessibility of the text to ELLs.

In this series, I’ve modeled how bilingual and dual language books are being used in classrooms to foster deep, critical thinking and a love of reading. Last week I looked at first and second grade, and this week I take a look at third and fourth grade:

Exemplar text: Grandma and Me at the Flea/ Los Meros Meros Remateros by Juan Felipe Herrera

Using Dual Language/Bilingual Books and Parent-Volunteers to Foster Deep Thinking in Third and Fourth Grade

Continue reading

Trick or Treat: Diverse Books for Halloween!

Halloween, thought to have originated with the ancient Celtic festival Samhain, is just around the corner! Whether you’re planning to spend the holiday pumpkin carving, trick-or-treating, or just relaxing with a cup of steaming hot apple cider, we have six diverse books full of thrills and chills to add to your Halloween festivities!

Ghosts for Breakfast

1. Ghosts for Breakfast by Stanley Todd Terasaki, illustrated by Shelly Shinjo

In this humorous story set in the 1920s, a Japanese American boy and his father investigate their neighbors’ report of ghosts in a nearby farmer’s field.

Continue reading

Children’s Book Press Titles Back In Print

Children's Book Press logoMany of you were fans of Children’s Book Press (CBP), an award-winning multicultural children’s publisher, long before it was acquired last year by Lee & Low Books. If you’ve been wondering which of your favorite titles have made it back to print under our new CBP imprint, I present you with our shiny new 2013 Children’s Book Press catalog:

Continue reading

Spring into Multicultural Children’s Books!

While it may not feel like it, today is the first day of spring! We’re very excited for our forthcoming spring titles, which you can check out here. To kick off the spring season, here’s an image and poem from Laughing Tomatoes and Other Spring Poems/Jitomates Risueños y otros poemas de primavera, written by Francisco X. Alarcón, and illustrated by Maya Christina Gonzalez, published by Children’s Book Press, an imprint of LEE & LOW.

Continue reading

Happy LGBT Pride Month!

June is LGBT Pride Month, and throughout this month people everywhere (including President Obama) have been celebrating the positive impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people have had in the world. The fight for LGBT rights has always been a matter of civil rights and equality, as our publisher noted in a recent post, and it’s nice that we live in an era when that’s acknowledged by so many people.

Continue reading