Guest post by Susanne Aspley
“First day of school! Who will I meet? Where is my cubby? Where is my seat?”
Parents are often more nervous for the first day of school than the children, especially language immersion school. The following is some helpful advice.
(Guest post from The Pack-n-Go Girls’ Janelle Diller)
Several years ago I was working on Mystery of the Thief in the Night, our Pack-n-Go Girls adventure about a girl from Seattle who sails to Mexico. Lisa, my business partner, and I had just made a conscious decision to make sure our American characters were as diverse as our international ones. And so I turned to my friend Angela, a first generation Chinese-American woman, for help in creating an Asian American character as the American girl in the story. She helped me, of course, with language and cultural details that I didn’t know. But the most important thing she did for me was to give me perspective. As we were winding down the conversation, she said, “Janelle, I’m so excited that you’re adding a Chinese American girl to your story. I can’t tell you how much it would have meant to me as a child to read a book that had a girl who looked like me in it.”
As a company devoted to promoting literacy and enriching children’s lives with access to books, Epic! is proud to support Multicultural Children’s Book Day in its mission of raising awareness and celebrating diversity.
With more than 20,000 e-books, audiobooks, and read-to-me books in our vast digital library, you get instant access to beloved popular and award-winning books for kids 12 & under. Read on any device — anywhere and anytime!
Celebrate Multicultural Children’s Day with our editorial picks for top 10 diversity & multicultural stories from across the globe! (And they’re all available to read on Epic!)
The prep for the upcoming Multicultural Children’s Book Day 2017 (1/27/17) is humming right along! In case you’ve missed all the details, Valarie Budayr from Jump Into A Book and Mia Wenjen from PragmaticMom are teaming up for the fourth year to raise awareness on the ongoing need to include kid’s books that celebrate diversity in home and school bookshelves while also working diligently to get more of these types of books into the hands of young readers, parents and educators.
Despite census data that shows 37% of the US population consists of people of color, only 10% of children’s books published have diversity content. Using the Multicultural Children’s Book Day holiday, the MCBD Team are on a mission to change all of that. This event has also proven to be an excellent way to compile a list of diverse children’s book titles and reviews for parents, grandparents, educators and librarians to use all year-long.
For the MCBD 2017 event, we have been very blessed to already have some amazing Sponsors in place. Our very first Platinum Sponsor, Scholastic, has signed on and we are beyond thrilled to have their support. Other Medallion Level Sponsors include heavy-hitters like Author Carole P. Roman, Audrey Press, KidLitTV, Capstone Young Readers, Author Gayle Swift, Wisdom Tales Press, Lee& Low Books, The Pack-n-Go Girls, Live Oak Media, Author Charlotte Riggle and Chronicle Books. If you know of someone interested in Sponsorship details, have them go HERE for the scoop.
The clock is ticking, the calendar is flipping and MCBD 2017 is getting closer and closer! Things are coming together beautifully as the MCBD Team works frantically to pull in more children's book reviewers and get teachers and classrooms signed up for the Free Diversity Book for Your Classroom Library campaign. There is SO MUCH exciting things...