Last Friday, my daughter Emma, our neighbours Thea and Will, and I headed off to North Vancouver to attend the Fall Book Harvest Festival. What a fabulous afternoon we had!

For me, the biggest thrill was finally meeting author Margriet Ruurs in person. Here she is reading her newest book My School in the Rain Forest to the kids. They loved the photos in this book and it was a real eye-opener for them to see some of the schools that kids attend. Thea was most interested in the Egypt page (”Wow – they can see the pyramids from their school!”) and Emma wished she could move to Scotland so she could attend school in a castle! Besides showing readers how schools differ throughout the world, Margriet has another goal for this book: to generate student interest in service learning and to encourage students to adopt a library or school in need of books or teaching resources. Click here to read Margriet’s ideas on this.

The photo to the right shows a book that is truly hot off the press! Author Rebecca Kool had only received this copy of Fly Catcher Boy from the printer a few hours earlier and the kids were quite impressed when she showed them that this was copy #1.

Written in English and using Japanese words and expressions throughout the text, Fly Catcher Boy tells the story of Kenji, who is alone during a thunderstorm one night when he is startled by a noise outside and finds a wet and miserable cat on his doorstep. He brings the cat inside and after introductions to his grandmother the next morning, Kenji and his new friend set off on adventures in their small Japanese town. The book also contains a glossary for phonetic pronunciation and the kanji letter for each Japanese word.

Here’s David J. Smith with his book If the World Were a Village. This book is a classic in our house so Emma and I were especially pleased to get a chance to talk to David and to see his newest book, If America Were a Village. This book uses (more…)

David J. Smith’s book If the World Were a Village: A Book about the World’s People (Kids Can Press, 2007) enables even young children to get a hold on what life is like for people all over the planet by reducing the world’s people to a single village with a population of 100. There is plenty going on in Shelagh Armstrong’s bright, boldy delineated illustrations to capture their imaginations too. The information has been updated for this current 2007 edition (it was first published in 2002) and there is no doubt that the book’s impact is as thought-provoking as ever. Be prepared for the questions it arouses like, “What can we do about this?”

The book covers nationalities, languages, ages, religions, food (“There is no shortage of food …if all the food were divided equally …But the food isn’t divided equally”…), air and water, money and possessions, electricity, the past and the future – and schooling and literacy. Since that is our current focus, let us look at little more closely at that one. It makes for sobering reading indeed: (more…)