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 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...
Thanks to our MCBD Facebook Group, I crossed paths with wonderful author named, Simone Da Costa. Simone’s book, I am Beautiful: When I Look at Me, I See … , is an inspirational book, created for middle school aged Black girls, aims to empower and liberate them to believe that they are beautiful, despite society’s notion of what “beauty” is.
