Pride and Prejudice for Wee Ones!

Friends!  We’ve discovered the most adorable series of board books based on English classics.

Pride and Prejudice will always be one of my very favorite stories! We watched the 1995 BBC version recently and I fell in love all over again.

Mother and I found this darling book in Waterstone’s and we couldn’t believe how adorable it was!

It’s a counting primer!

I can’t decide if number 2 or number 3 is my favorite! (favourite?)

If you’re as charmed as me by a board book based on Jane Austen’s classic, then you should check out the whole series.  Moby Dick for a baby boy?  Yes, please!

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Let Freedom Sing is a new book this season about the Civil Rights Movement.  Vanessa Newton is the author and illustrator of this striking picture book.

The story follows the major events of the Movement where individuals let their lights shine, beginning with Rosa Parks and ending with Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing the Civil Rights Act.  At the end the author also includes the milestone moment when the United States elected its first African-American president, Barack Obama.

As Arkansans, these Little Rock Nine are dear to my heart.  I think I have read every book published by or about any of these nine precious souls.  I am reminded of their courage every time I drive by Central High School or the monument at the Arkansas Capital in their honor.

Along with important historical dates, the author illustrates some of the common inequalities of the day with the lyrics of the spiritual, This Little Light Of Mine.

Ruby Bridges let her light shine.

There is so much joy and hope in this illustration of the March on Washington in 1963.  It might be my favorite.

At the end of the story, people of all different races are letting their lights shine together.

With its happy illustrations and sweet song lyrics, this book is a wonderful way to introduce this time period to really young readers.

I was recently reminded on Rage Against the Minivan how important it is to have picture books in our homes that have images of all different races.  Let Freedom Sing would be a beautiful addition to any child’s library.

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Since we saw the pandas at the Memphis Zoo on Sunday, we’ve been reading this Bill Martin Jr/Eric Carle treasure, Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See?

I love all the books in this series, but this one uses all endangered animals, so it is a great learning tool.

The way these books progress make them so fun to read to toddlers, and now Simon reads them to me which makes my heart happy.

I can’t decide if the panda bear or the sea lion is my favorite illustration.

We will never be too old for picture books at the Chino House.  They are the most fun.

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At the recommendation of a favorite teacher, I picked up A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park for the kids at the library.

It is based on the true story of one of the lost boys of Sudan, who leaves his village during an attack.  He is separated from his family and left to wander Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya for the next several years.  He eventually learns English and becomes one of a handful chosen to go to the United States. His story of survival is inspiring and hopeful, as he now uses his energy and resources in America to dig wells for communities in Sudan.

The author parallels his story with a young girl’s journey of walking every morning and every afternoon to collect water for her family.  It is her entire life’s occupation as it takes all morning to bring one container and all afternoon to bring a second.  When water comes to her village, her entire life is changed and she can go to school.

The way the stories run alongside each other and then meet at the end at a new well is beautiful.

Also significant to me was that at one point the main character is in a refugee camp reminiscing about his life in his village with his family, and he says that on special occasions his father would ride to a town and bring back beans and rice.

Beans and rice were his special foods.

Right now for a season of time, our family is eating beans and rice for lunch and dinner every day as a part of a project in which I am taking part.  I have complained not just a little bit about being tired of beans and rice.  It was humbling to remember that for many, many in the world, the addition of beans and rice to a table is special.  Celebratory.

I loved Linda Sue Park’s writing so I also picked up her Newberry award winning book, A Single Shard.  In the opening scenes of the book, a homeless boy in Korea follows a man down a path who has a small hole in his rice bag.  He stops and picks up each grain of rice that has dropped, and as he is collecting them he says to himself, We will have a feast tonight!

Rice is a feast.

Beans are a special occasion.

I love that I am getting this much needed reminder from a couple of books I picked up for my kids.

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It is such a wonderful movie.  Mary Polly first saw it in elementary school and so we checked it out at the library and watched it as a family after she told us about it.  Simon was a baby though, so he had not seen it before.

After we watched it, Ben pulled out our books about Ruby Bridges to show Simon and we’ve been reading them over the last couple of weeks.

Simon was even carrying them to bed with him. Love.

Ruby Bridges‘ story is one of my favorites of the Civil Rights Movement because of the way the faith of her family carried her through the difficult journey.  As with many of the students who were brave enough to be the first to attend all-white schools, Ruby’s family sacrifice a lot to be a part of this historical moment.  They were ostracized on both sides of the cause.  The whole family drew strength from an inner source that enabled them to respond to the world in a way that is counter intuitive.

Ruby was six years old when she became the first black student to attend the formerly all-white William Frantz Public School in New Orleans, Louisiana.  It was the fall of 1960.

The rest of the parents pulled their children out of school.

She spent the entire year walking through an angry mob to sit all alone in a classroom for first grade with her teacher Mrs. Henry.

This storybook tells how one day Ruby’s teacher saw her lips moving and thought she had finally decided to speak up to the white mob outside, but later discovered that she was actually praying for them.  Usually she prayed for them before she got to school, but she had forgotten that morning so she stopped and prayed right in the middle of the mob.

Please, God, try to forgive those people.

Because even if they say those bad things,

They don’t know what they’re doing.

So You could forgive them,

Just like You did those folks a long time ago

When they said terrible things about You.

Ruby’s story of fighting through the year with prayer and a heart of forgiveness makes me cry every time.  I just shake my head in wonder at her sweet spirit.

She is still working today to bring about racial reconciliation with schools.

She wrote her own story in another children’s book called Through My Eyes.

She puts her story within the context of the greater landscape of the Civil Rights Era, which makes it a great home or class resource for children.

Ruby Bridges was also the subject for Norman Rockwell’s iconic painting, The Problem We All Live With.

The kids and I are headed to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN this weekend.  I have never been before, so I am excited.

I would love to hear about what others are doing this year during Black History Month, so please share!  If you don’t have plans yet, be sure to add watching sweet Ruby Bridges to your list.

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Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorensen was our latest evening read aloud at the Chino House.  An old favorite, this book won the Newberry medal in 1957.

It is a precious story of a family who returns to the mother’s ancestral home in the country when the father has trouble re-entering life after being in a POW camp in the war.

Marly, the young daughter, is the chief observer of the miracles on Maple Hill, which are all the simple gifts of nature, like maple syrup from tree sap, the first signs of spring, or a huddle of baby foxes.

The daily treasures of life in the country, and the delight of having the time to notice the wonder, bring about a healing to the family that is the real miracle of the story.

It is as sappy sweet as syrup and we loved it so much we could taste the first run of the sap from the maple trees in our hearts!

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This year we are looking at Great Migration books.

This fall, my aunt recommended The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.  It is a sweeping history of the many decades that cover the Great Migration told in a beautiful narrative.

Countless personal stories that came from Wilkerson’s personally interviewing over 1200 people make up the shape of the book.  They are held together by three main characters whose journeys make up the bulk of the narrative: Ida Mae Gladney, who moves from Mississippi to Chicago, George Starling, who fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster who left Louisiana and ended up in California.

Less than halfway in, I am already deeply invested in where the individual migrations of these three are taking them.

Between 1915 and 1970, it is estimated that 6 million black citizens left the South in search of a better life.  The author has set out to give us a broader picture of this historical event.

from the introduction:

The actions of the people in this book were both universal and distinctly American.  Their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making.  They did what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable–what the pilgrims did under the tyranny of British rule, what the Scotch-Irish did in Oklahoma when the land turned to dust, what the Irish did when there was nothing to eat, what the European Jews did during the spread of Nazism, what the landless in Russia, Italy, China, and elsewhere did when something better across the ocean called to them.  What binds these stories together was the back-against-the-wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were.  They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done.

They left.

We have also come across two wonderful children’s books on the Great Migration.  The Great Migration is told through the beautiful paintings of Jacob Lawrence.

These paintings were my first introduction to the Great Migration.  I saw them at a special exhibition during the years we lived in Chicago.  I remember being captured by them for hours.

So I was excited to see them put into a book for children.  The story begins in the South in cotton fields and ends in the city in the North, where, though there is more freedom, life is still not easy for the migrants.

I love the paintings of families gathered to discuss what to do, of groups of people traveling with only what they could carry and of railway stations packed with black Americans full of hope.

And the migrants kept coming.

Theirs is a story of African-American strength and courage.  I share it now as my parents told it to me, because their struggles and triumphs ring true today.  People all over the world are still on the move, trying to build better lives for themselves and for their families.

God Bless the Child is a picture book interpretation of Billie Holliday’s famous song by the same name.  Illustrator Jerry Pinkney tells the story through pictures of a family that moves from the rural South to the urban North during the Great Migration.

Jerry Pinkney’s illustrations are so beautiful.

You can feel the family’s camaraderie through these images.

Isabel Wilkerson refers to Richard Wright as the bard of the Great Migration.  She opens her book with this quote from his poem that also gave her the title of her book.  These few lines tell so much about this period in our nation’s history.

I was leaving the South

To fling myself into the unknown…

I was taking a part of the South

To transplant in alien soul,

To see if it could grow differently,

If it could drink of new and cool rains,

Bend in strange winds,

Respond to the warmth of other suns,

And perhaps, to bloom.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! Every year on this day, I honor in my heart those who have fought to make this country better for African Americans and I grieve the shameful history of the South, a place I have long loved.

Yesterday, at church, our pastor preached the Gospel that is for all people, that in Jesus we would all be reconciled to God and to one another.  Every year I hope we get a little closer to that reality.

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Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing is already a treasure at our house.  It is a beautiful devotional book for children.

We are using it in the mornings for family devotions.  They are the perfect length (short) and are full of sweet thoughts to turn little (and big) hearts towards God for the day.

I love having a new book for devotions for a new year.  Do you have a book you love to read with your children in the mornings?

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After seeing Antoni Gaudi’s work in Barcelona, I have been reading books about him.  I also found these two children’s books about Antoni Gaudi that I read to Simon and Ben about this amazing architect and his life.

They both have beautiful illustrations of Gaudi’s work.  I think it would be fun to use the pictures from these books to make Gaudi-inspired construction paper mosaics.

The first story, Building on Nature, by Rachel Rodriquez with illustrations by Julie Paschkis is about Gaudi’s life as a young boy and how much he loved nature.  He used nature as his inspiration for everything.  You can look to nature to understand his propensity to rid buildings of straight lines and edges.

Park Guell is one of the most whimsical places I have ever been, and this book captures its beauty and its personality.

The second book, Gargoyles, Girders and Glass Houses by Bo Zaunders with illustrations by Roxie Munro is actually about seven different master builders.  Gaudi is included along with Filippo Brunelleschi and Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel in this fun book about some of the world’s most amazing architectural wonders.

The few pages about Gaudi’s life in this book include a more detailed account of his death.  We learned in Barcelona that he was hit by a streetcar, probably as he stepped out in the street to look up at tower that had just been completed on La Sagrada Familia, but this book explains that he was not recognized immediately because in his later years he had foregone his finer clothes for simpler ways.  He was mistaken for a tramp and so he did not receive medical attention soon enough to be of any help.  He died three days later.

I loved reading both of these accounts of Gaudi’s life to the kids.  Both stories mention that Gaudi was different from others even as a child, which, I like to remember, is a good thing.  He had an unusual vision that he harnessed to create some of the most breathtaking structures in the world.

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Ben went through a phase of wanting to hear The Rusty Trusty Tractor by Joy Cowley every night when he was little.  And now Simon is loving this story just as much.

It is about a grandfather and grandson who are working to bring in their crop of hay with an old tractor.

A salesman tries to talk the grandpa into buying a new model, but he won’t hear it.  He can’t part with his old friend, the tractor he can fix with wires and that he coaxes through each passing season.

This precious story reminds me of the patience and determination of farmers I’ve had the privilege of meeting.

As we read it this summer, the boys and I talked about how the drought we’ve had this year would affect this farmer and his grandson.  I’ve been watching Arkansas farm news more closely since I got to hear stories from a farmer this past spring.

I’ve been thinking that we should definitely put on our boots and make a trip to visit a farm this fall.

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