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Blog

Multicultural Children’s Book Day is excited to partner with Reading Rockets about the upcoming We Are Water Protectors event with our Co-Creator and President, Mia Wenjen, for Multicultural Children’s Book Club. It’s free and virtual!

Reading Rockets is a national public media literacy initiative offering information and resources on how young kids learn to read, why so many struggle, and how caring adults can help.

In celebration of World Nature Conservation Day (July 28) and National Clean Beaches Week (July 1-7), the online Multicultural Children’s Book Club meeting will take place on July 7th at 7:00 pm EST.

A Native American speaker from the Water Protector Legal Collective will be a featured guest in addition to Carole Lindstrom, author of We Are Water Protectors – as they discuss how we can protect our environment, especially our water.

As our tenth Multicultural Children’s Book Day holiday approaches on Thursday, January 26, 2023, we are thrilled to have you as part of our amazing community of supporters! With enthusiasm, optimism, and hope, we are preparing for MCBD 2023 and hope you will once again join our celebration of diversity through children’s books.

During last year’s Twitter party a topic that came up often was children’s mental health as a result (or as a side effect) of the pandemic.  This includes but is not limited to anxiety, depression, social isolation, sadness, pandemic fatigue, and mindfulness techniques: in other words, “surviving Covid-19.” We read your Twitter posts and your requests for mental health resources for kids. We listened, and now we’re happy to share with you this year’s classroom kit: Mental Health Support for Stressful Times.  

In this classroom kit, you’ll find resources on 

Guest post by Afsaneh Moradian

 

Our story 

About two years ago, my child informed us that they are nonbinary. That they don’t identify as either boy or girl and that their pronouns are now they/them.  Of course, this was fine with me. But, it did take a lot of work to stop using she/her in reference to my child. I’d been doing that for so many years, I was on autopilot. I tried and made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. Then I saw my child’s face when someone called them she. My child cringed and felt so uncomfortable. 

Guest post by Kshama Alur
It’s Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month all month long, and we are delighted to share with you this guest post from indigrow, MCBD’s May Sponsor of the Month.

“My kid is too young, I don’t need to think we need to talk about cultural identity so soon, right?”

Wrong!
Parents of young kids often feel conversations involving seemingly heavy topics like how we look, what we wear, what we eat, what we sound like, and how we are named, are conversations that don’t need to be addressed until much later.  But science tells us that kids notice differences as early as 6 months of age. More importantly, the reality is that kids get called out for these obvious differences as early as their preschool and kindergarten years.

During the month of May, independent publisher Language Lizard will donate a portion of the proceeds from the sales of their Living in Harmony book sets (available in Ukrainian and 30 additional languages) to support refugee families affected by recent global conflicts. 

The Living in Harmony books: Be Kind, We Can All Be Friends, and Who Are We? use colorful, multicultural illustrations to explore the concepts of diversity, kindness, and friendship. The books come with free teaching resources including lesson plans and extension activities. 

Guest post by Andrew Maraniss

Last week, Tennessee school librarians held their annual breakfast reception at the state legislature, setting up tables piled with cinnamon rolls, scones, and coffee.

Only a few legislators dropped by. Instead, they sent over assistants to load up paper plates to bring back to their offices.

That wasn’t surprising. If I were a member of Tennessee’s Republican supermajority, I’d be embarrassed to show my face around school librarians, too.

Drunk on power and buzzed on culture-war adrenaline in a mid-term election year, Tennessee Republicans have introduced bills to ban books in K-12 schools that “address” or “normalize” LGBTQ people or issues, to criminalize school librarians for carrying supposedly “obscene” books, and to ban the discussion of “divisive” concepts such as race even at state universities.

IG Live Series for Autism Acceptance Month Throughout April, as part of our focus on Autism Acceptance Month, MCBD is highlighting autistic authors and illustrators and allies in our IG live series! Each week, we cover a different genre of children's literature, from picture books and middle grade novels to graphic novels and YA books. In...