Tag Archives: love

Valentine’s Day Children’s Books that Celebrate Familial Love

In this guest post, writer Rebecca En-Szu Hu-Van Wright compiles a list of 9 books to read with your loved ones for Valentine’s Day.

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, there’s going to be a lot of talk about love…and there’s no better time to remember that family is often the first place children learn about love. Whether it is with a grandparent, a sibling, or an adopted parent, each relationship is special in its own way. To pay tribute to all the wonderful, different kinds of familial love, we’ve put together a book list of titles that celebrate and explore these unique bonds.

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Using Children’s Books to Teach About Love and Belonging

Guest blogger Katie Cunningham is an Assistant Professor at Manhattanville College. Her teaching and scholarship centers around children’s literature, critical guest bloggerliteracy, and supporting teachers to make their classrooms joyful and purposeful. Katie has presented at numerous national conferences and is the editor of The Language and Literacy Spectrum, New York Reading Association’s literacy journal. 

We know love when we see it. The best mornings I have as a parent are when I see love between my sons. Moments like when my one-and-a-half year old spontaneously hugs my four year old, and he hugs him back. The best mornings I had as a teacher were when I saw love between my students. When a second grader high-fives a classmate for taking a risk with a math problem or when a student sits by someone at lunch who looks alone. As a parent and an educator, I am always on the look out for stories that center love in ways that enable young children to immediately but deeply understand what love is.

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The Inspiration Behind the Artwork: World Travel

Our new picture book How Far Do You Love Me? takes readers on a trip around the world with illustrations of children and their loved ones. Here’s a fun fact: author and illustrator Lulu Delacre has actually been to all thirteen places depicted in the book!

She was kind enough to share a few photographs from her own travels that inspired the art for How Far Do You Love Me?. Enjoy!

Ladakh, Himalaya mountain range, Kashmir, India

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Why the Lee & Low staff walked 12 miles

Last fall, some of the staff at Lee & Low wanted to find out what it was like to walk twelve miles. Why? We were inspired by the feat that Frederick Douglass’ mother accomplishes in Love Twelve Miles Long by Glenda Armand and Colin Bootman: she walks twelve miles by night to visit her son. As happened often with slave families, Frederick was separated from her at birth and sent to live on another plantation, so this was the only way that he was going to be able to see her.

So, one brisk November morning, four of us met near Wall Street to begin a journey that would take us all day. Honestly, the longer that the trip took, the more we realized what an incredibly daunting task this actually was. When we started the walk, we figured it would take a few hours, but imagined that we would be back in the office in time for a well-deserved lunch.

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Black History Month Giveaway 2012

It’s Black History Month, and that means another giveaway from Lee & Low Books! We’re giving away three sets of three books featuring African Americans, and the contest will run through February 29, 2012.

You may have noticed that the winners won’t get their books until after Black History Month. We think Black History Month is important, but black history is part of American History, and shouldn’t get relegated to one month out of the year. So enter below to win three great books to enjoy all year long!

Here’s how it works:

Author Glenda Armand (Love Twelve Miles Long) gave us food for thought in her BookTalk when we asked her if she thought her book could only be used during Black History Month. Here is her response:

“I think it can be read at any time of year: it is a story about mother-child relationships, about slavery, about American history, and about a great statesman. It is a story about family and tradition. And it’s a bedtime story.

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