Rochelle Strauss, illustrated by Rosemary Woods,
One Well: The Story of Water on Earth
Kids Can Press, 2007.

Ages 8-12

Herb Shoveller,
Ryan and Jimmy: And the Well in Africa That Brought Them Together
Kids Can Press 2006.

Ages 8-12

There would be no life on this planet without it: every organism on earth needs water to survive. Both One Well and Ryan and Jimmy demonstrate in different ways just how precious a resource water is and how we have a responsibility to look after it and ensure that it is kept safe and clean and indeed available.

One Well uses the symbolism of a well to represent all the water on the earth. Animals come to the well to drink; fish live in the well, we need the well for our own drinking water… but the well is now severely at risk from pollution and over-exploitation. We all have a responsibility to be “Well Aware” and to teach our children to become Well Aware also. This is a good resource to set that in motion. The enormity of the facts and figures given is by no means diminished by the symbolism here; indeed, the notion of the well allows even young children to grasp the notion of just how precious our water is and that we cannot take it for granted. Rosemary Wood’s illustrations which swirl through the text intensify the image of the well but also ensure that the metaphor is not taken too literally.

Meanwhile, Ryan and Jimmy is the truly remarkable story of a six-year-old Canadian boy’s determination to build a well in Africa and the series of life-altering events that followed. He was so horrified to hear at school that there were children in the world who did not have safe drinking-water, that he doggedly set about raising money to build a well in Africa. News of his determination filtered into other people’s lives and the ripple effect of his actions eventually gave rise to the setting up of Ryan’s Well Foundation. A class pen pal scheme brought Ryan into contact with Akana Jimmy. They then met in 2000 when Ryan and his family travelled to Uganda to see for themselves “Ryan’s well” in Jimmy’s village. Then in 2002, Jimmy’s life was dramatically changed when rebels attacked his village and captured him to be a child soldier. Although he managed to escape, his life was now at risk. Eventually, he managed to get to Canada, where he was awarded refugee status and became a member of Ryan’s family. Now, both Ryan and Jimmy are involved in the Foundation and have travelled all over the world, raising awareness about the importance of clean water. To date, 319 wells have been built in Africa, South America and India, bringing clean water to more than 450 000 people.

Full of photographs and pictures of letters and drawings, laid on a background of varying bright, earthy African colors and patterns, the book is visually exciting; the story is even more so. The writing is well paced and serves the facts up straight – if it aims to inspire, it certainly succeeds.

These two books compliment each other well (indeed One Well actually cites Ryan’s Well Foundation) and are invaluable resources both for the introduction of water as a school topic and for follow-up reading at home. One Well gives the facts and figures and reasons why we should be taking care of this precious resource; Ryan and Jimmy provides the inspiration for even young children to recognise that every little bit helps and that they can make a difference.

Marjorie Coughlan
November 2007

A portion of all book sales go to fund One Hen, Inc.’s programs in disadvantaged communities.

Eenie Meenie Manitoba explores Canadian geography in such delightful rhyming poems as “Toronto-to-to,” “Horsing Around BC,” “On the Rideau,” and “Charlottetown Fishmongers.”  In this huge country with such wildly diverse landscapes, climates and cultures, it’s great to find a book that attempts to cover all the ‘bases’ so to speak!  Alongside some poems are directions on how to use the rhymes in play.  For example, to the poem “To Be, or Not To Be,” one can pull petals off of a daisy in the way people used to with the old  ‘she loves me, she loves me not’ rhyme.  “Apple Me Dapple Me” is a good poem to bounce a ball to.  And for skipping, there’s “Nova Scotia Lobsters.”  The trick is to memorize the poem so one can use it in play.   Summer is a good time to try out these rhymes and get your kids and yourselves outside with a bit of rope and a ball.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Carol at Carol’s Corner.

See Saw Saskatchewan is a playful collection of poems  that can be skipped to, ball-bounced to, or clapped to.  The poems are about life in Canada in various locations featuring activities, or animals, or sights particular to the locale.  There’s definitely a touch of Dennis Lee in these poems that’s detectable in such poems that play on Canadian place names like in  ‘Niagara Falls’:

Kapuskasing sings
Cornwall calls
Thunder Bay storms,
And Niagara
FALLS!

In fact there are a lot of playful references to famous children’s rhymes which you can tell by the titles of some of the poems like ‘Pick a peck of P.E.I.’ or ‘Take Toronto by the Toe’.  I had to laugh at the poem referring to my home city of Winnipeg: ‘Winnipeg Mosquitoes’. Yes, we do often have them and in enough abundance, to make them poetry-worthy! There’s a cute illustration of two besotted mosquitoes sucking blood out of a finger, which vaguely reminded me of a line from John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ — “wherein two bloods mingled be” — except in this case it’s the reverse with the blood of one Canadian ‘mingled’ into two lovelorn mosquitoes! Now if that isn’t an image of Canadian love, I don’t know what is.

Do you know of any good poetry books that celebrate your locale? Or play with the funny names of your towns and cities? In Canada, we have some great place names like Moose Jaw and Nipissing, Tumbler Ridge and Nanaimo. See Saw Saskatchewan does a nice job of making Canada a fun place to read about with its delightful poems set all over the land.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by jama at jama rattigan’s alphabet soup.

Think Again

Make sure that your heart
isn’t too well defended.
Your heart is designed
to be broken and mended.

Accompanying each poem is a lovely illustration by Morstad that gets at the ‘heart’, so to speak of the poem.  There are 61 poems altogether and one can easily read through the book in a short time, but the poems are of the kind that are worth revisiting.  They are loosely based on the feelings of  young lovers, sometimes towards or about each other;  at other times, the poems are just about the individuals themselves.  Though not quite as linguistically acrobatic as Lawson’s earlier book on lipograms, Think Again is nontheless a charming collection of poems that are witty and playful in their own way.

I have to quote the last poem in the book, “An Attempt at Description”, because it’s about tigers(!) and about what poets try to do with their words.

How to describe the natural world?
I think I know how to begin:
A tiger has terrible, beautiful eyes,
And the night has lovely skin.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this small taste of Lawson’s recent poetry and seek out your own copy of Think Again. It will be well worth it.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Mary Ann at Great Kid Books.

Sheila Barry, Kids Can Press’ editor-in-chief, answered our questions about One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference, one of the seven books selected for inclusion in our Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set Donation Project, and about other topics related to the company and to multicultural children’s literature.

Q&A

PT: One Hen by Katie Smith Milway, illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes is one of the most talked about books of the last few years (and arguably the one most used in classrooms across the United States and Canada). How did this project come about for Kids Can Press?

SB: Katie wrote a picture book for Kids Can some years ago, so we were the first people she approached when she decided she wanted to write an informational picture book that would allow her to share her knowledge of development issues in Africa, where she once worked in a village very like the one in the book. Since we had already published other informational picture books on global subjects, we were excited to work with Katie on developing her concept—and obviously we’ve been thrilled with the end result.

PT: Did Kids Can expect the book to do as well as it did, or have some of the ripple effects of its publication come as a surprise?

SB: We hope all our books will do well, but sometimes it does seem that a book comes into the world at exactly the right time to take off. With One Hen, we knew we had done something pretty original in making the subject of microloans both accessible and inspiring for children. We hoped buyers would appreciate our accomplishment, and we’ve been gratified to see that our title clearly struck a chord for many, many readers.

PT: What about the choice of Eugenie Fernandes to illustrate One Hen? How did CBP go about finding the best match for the story?

SB: Eugenie Fernandes is very well-known in Canada as both a writer and an illustrator of picture books for very young children. But in addition to her classic picture books (her new book Kitten’s Spring just came out), she has also illustrated an older book for us called Earth Magic, a collection of poems by Dionne Brand, a Trinidadian-Canadian writer. This book marked a real departure for Eugenie, and it also showed us that she would be perfect for One Hen. Eugenie’s mixed-media artwork creates the effect almost of magic realism, a hybrid style that is perfect for this book, since it is at once a picture book and a work of non-fiction.

PT: For those readers who may not be familiar with Kids Can Press, how would you describe your catalog? What are some of your bestselling books/or genres?

SB: Kids Can Press is a Canadian publisher dedicated to children’s books. We publish for children from birth to age 16, and we publish in all genres—picture books, non-fiction, fiction, graphic novels, craft and activity books, and so on. Our list is diverse, but we keep children at the centre. We hope that every book we produce will both entertain and enlighten, and we believe that you don’t have to sacrifice one aspect in order to achieve the other.

PT: Can you please tell us a little bit about the CitizenKid Series and how it fits in with Kids Can’s overarching goals?

SB: CitizenKid has been percolating for nearly 10 years now, ever since we published If the World Were a Village. That book touched people around the world, and we realized that there was a real appetite for books that introduced children to a global perspective on important issues. We started working hard at making sure we had a book a year that brought this global perspective to our publishing programme. When we realized in the spring of 2009 that we had a substantial collection of books on a breadth of topics, we decided it was time to brand them officially.

PT: How does Kids Can reconcile taking risks with making projects work from a financial perspective?

SB: In a perfect world, all our projects would be both innovative and financially successful. Unfortunately, I don’t know that there’s formula that anyone can use to reconcile risks versus financials. We make decisions one project at a time, by gathering people from editorial, design, sales and marketing into a room, where we debate (and sometimes argue) until we reach a decision that everyone is happy with. It’s not a very scientific method, but it does let us feel confident that whichever way we go, all viewpoints have been heard and acknowledged. And I think the result is a list that has a good balance between books with greater commercial appeal (and perhaps greater financial viability) and books that are more unusual (and perhaps appeal to a smaller market).

PT: What are some of the biggest challenges Kids Can faces as a children’s book publisher in Canada? What main changes in the industry have you noticed, since 1973, in regards to the publishing of multicultural books?

SB: Canada is a small market, and it can be difficult to generate sufficient revenue from Canadian sales alone. We are therefore eager to sell our books both in the US and into other international markets. The biggest problem we face is that we are a relatively small publisher. Our promotional budgets are correspondingly small, and sometimes it can be hard to get noticed in a world that is full of really wonderful books. We rely a great deal of on word of mouth, especially from librarians and teachers. It has been clear to us for over a decade that educators are increasingly eager to give the children in their care information about the whole world, in all its diversity, and so we have tried hard to produce books that will fill that need. I think we have been successful with One Hen and the other books in the CitizenKid collection.

PT: What are your hopes for the future of Kids Can?

SB: We hope we will continue to produce innovative and original books for children of all ages for many years to come.

…

Thank you, Sheila, for taking the time to answer our questions. We are very grateful to Kids Can Press for donating copies of One Hen in support of the Spirit of PaperTigers project. We wish you and the company continued success!

To find out more about Kids Can Press and for a list of their authors and illustrators, visit their website.

“Inadequate access to safe water and sanitation services, coupled with poor hygiene practices, kills and sickens thousands of children every day, and leads to impoverishment and diminished opportunities for thousands more.”

Older Brother and Little Bother cite a statistic they believe comes from WaterAid that 3 people die every 10 minutes because of a lack of clean water. In an attempt to turn this remote, hopeless-sounding figure into something they can get their heads round, we are currently reading Ryan and Jimmy: And the Well in Africa that Brought Them Together by Herb Shoveller (Kids Can Press, 2006). This is the wonderful and inspiring story of how the determination of one small boy in Canada, Ryan Hreljac, captured people’s imagination so that he was able to raise the $2,000 needed to buy a well for a community in Uganda – and then go on raising money to fund drills for more wells – so that now, the Ryan’s Well Foundation, with the now eighteen-year-old Ryan at its head, is working to bring safe drinking water and increase sanitation and hygiene awareness in 16 countries around the world.

Another engaging book and superb resource for raising young people’s awareness about water is One Well: The Story of Water on Earth by Rochelle Strauss and illustrated by Rosemary Woods, also published by Kids Can Press, in 2007. You can read my joint review of both these books here.

March 22nd is the U.N. designated World Water Day and the theme for 2010 is water quality. To raise awareness of safe water, and also to lobby those attending an international meeting hosted by UNICEF, to be held in Washington in April, several water charities have come together to organise an attempt to break the world record for the “World’s Longest Toilet Queue” between 20th and 22nd March – you can join the line on-line or find an event somewhere in the world near you – or set one up for yourself, using the resources here… Let us know if you do stand in line…

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: only 31 of the 38 school-aged villagers go to school, where there is only one teacher, and

Not everybody in the global village is encouraged to learn to read, write and think. Of the 88 people old enough to read, 71 can read at least a little, but 17 cannot read at all. More males are taught to read than females.

This is certainly something to bear in mind as we approach International Literacy Day on 8th September…

David Smith provides useful ideas for teaching children about the global village at the end of the book concluding with the following:

…what we need is not just facts, but a way of looking at the world that tells the story truthfully. We need to become truly world-minded and to foster that attitude in our children.

This book is a starting point and there are plenty of follow-on resources to promote deeper awareness, including these from Kids Can Press and these from A & C Black, the book’s UK publisher (KS2 = 7-11 year olds, KS3 = 11-14). There is also a video cartoon version: there are different previews here and here.

On the last page, there is “A note on sources and how the calculations were made” and it is perhaps worth pointing out that while scrupulous research went into acquiring the data, Smith himself states that not all the sources necessarily agreed with each other – especially when it came to predicting the future. This is perhaps to be expected but Smith presents these figures and introduces global awareness to young and not-so-young children in a way that it would be hard to beat.

You can also read reviews from “Book For Keeps” here and from Anti-Racist Parent here. The Miniature Earth Project blog also mentions another book, If The World Were A Village Of 100 People by Ikeda Kayoko but I’ve only been able to track it down in Spanish and French… anybody know any more about it?