Congratulations to the winner of my first August Giveaway – Amazing Books to Help Students Meet New Americans. One Good Thing about America by Ruth Freeman goes to a teacher in New Hampshire. This week, it’s a story of migrations for the youngest of readers, Duncan Tonathiu’s Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote. It’s an award winning…
Warren St. John, writer of Outcasts United about a soccer team made up of refugee kids in Clarkson, Georgia said “children live in this fantastic mosaic of society.” His hope for the book was that people “might risk the awkwardness of interacting with someone unlike themselves.” The coach of the team he profiled, Luma Mufleh,…
ALA-YALSA offers a reading list of YA fiction and nonfiction to help teens understand the refugee experience. The Refugee Experience for Teens. The comments section took me to work of nonfiction I have to read, In the Sea There are Crocodiles, the story of Enaiatollah Akbadi written by Fabio Geda. It is Geda’s “first person rendition” of Enaia’s journey…
Here is what I imagine. Elsa Marston’s literary love affair with Lebanon and the Middle East might also have been about a love affair with her husband, Iliya Harik. He was from Lebanon and taught at Indiana University all their married life. Elsa Marston has just died. I can say she was my colleague, but…
“World of Words” says. “Literature expands children’s life spaces and takes them outside the boundaries of their lives to other places, times, and ways of living in order to participate in alternative ways of being in the world. Readers are invited to immerse themselves into story worlds to gain insights about how people live, feel,…