Exciting news from The Global Fund for Children (GFC):

We are pleased to announce the release of our new picture puzzle book, I Am Different, by Manjula Padmanabhan, for children aged 3 to 8. Each colorfully illustrated page contains one key difference to discover—an item that’s a different color, a different shape, reversed from left to right, or just asleep when others are awake.

Paired with each picture puzzle is the question “Can you find me?” in one of 16 languages. Children will have fun trying out Hebrew, Arabic, French, Swahili, and American Sign Language. And they may find that “different” is just as nice as “same.”

Kirkus Reviews calls I Am Different “a tour de force. … A substantive, engaging title for multilingual education.”

A portion of the proceeds from the sales of I Am Different and all Global Fund for Children books supports innovative community-based organizations that serve children and youth worldwide.

We have also recently released a new guide to high-quality websites and books that foster diversity learning in children. The guide, Kids Becoming Global Citizens: Resources for Parents and Educators, includes 250 summary annotations of children’s books; over 100 online resources, including lesson plans and activities, interactive games, and multimedia resources; and recommended books for parents and educators. Topics range from diversity in the United States to environmental stewardship, and from global citizenship to religious diversity.

The guide is free and available to the public at http://bookstore.globalfundforchildren.org/index.php/resourceguide. All books and resources were chosen for their overall quality and content and for their positive portrayal of different cultures.

“This guide can help  teach children about a wide range of topics related to diversity and global citizenship,” said Cynthia Pon, director of Global Fund for Children Books. “After scouring the Internet and exploring what the literary community has to offer in terms of diversity education, we hope this guide will provide hours of enjoyment, enrich lesson plans, and encourage thoughtful conversations.”

The guide is authored by Pon and Kelly Swanson Turner, with assistance from Laurel Fiorelli.

To learn more about The Global Fund for Children (GFC) be sure to read PaperTigers’  interview with Maya Ajmera, founder and president of GFC.

Maya Ajmera, Sheila Kinkade, Cynthia Pon; Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
Our Grandparents: A Global Album
The Global Fund for Children/Charlesbridge Publishing, 2010.

Ages 5-8

Yeye. Babushka. Deda. Oma. What better way to celebrate our common humanity than to honor the love of our grandparents? As Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes, “In our role as elders, we help bridge the present with the past… We make sure that the wisdom of our ancestors is passed on to the next generation.” In Our Grandparents: A Global Album, the authors bridge both cultures and generations by inviting readers to meet grandparents across the world as they bond with their own grandchildren.

Each two-page spread features a simple line of text revealing a universal truth about family, illustrated with photographs of a grandparent and a grandchild from places as diverse as Yemen, Romania, and Peru. Vibrant country-specific photographs stand in lieu of drawn illustrations, transporting the reader to towns, villages, cities, and countryside to experience the diversity of ways grandparents play, learn, love, read and explore with their grandchildren. For example, next to “Grandparents explore the world with us,” we see three photographs: a Japanese grandson on the computer with his grandfather, a young girl in Greenland pushed on a sled by her grandfather, and a grandparent with grandchildren at the zoo in the United States.

Minimal text encourages children to interact with the striking photographs to identify different families’ activities, settings, customs and habits, while absorbing the importance of multigenerational bonding and the special role of grandparents. While the book does not include background information about the countries represented, the richness of the photographs and the questions they trigger provide a perfect springboard for a teacher or library group studying different cultures or places.  The authors’ meticulous attention to cultural diversity within countries, as well as across them, avoids the narrow representation of a country with a single group.  In photographs from the United States, for example, Native Americans feature prominently alongside Italian, African, Asian and mixed race American families.

Each photograph clearly labels the country of origin, and a map at the back of the book shows that “The grandparents and grandchildren in this book come from all over the world.” The authors also offer “Five Things to Do With Your Grandparents,” and part of the proceeds goes to The Global Fund for Children‘s grant-making for community-based projects benefiting children around the world.

Sara Hudson
April 2011

It is common knowledge that children who attend school have a better chance of developing into their full potential and bringing about change in their communities. It’s hard to believe that, in this day and age, so many of the world’s children still aren’t given the opportunity of an education.

Dedicated to “all children who dream of going to school”, Going to School in India is a celebration of what school can be and mean to children. It shows and tells about all kinds of kids—from street kids to kids who go to government and community schools—and how they “climb into school buses, sit on each other’s laps in cycle rickshaws, walk along the edges of mountains, cross scorching deserts on rickety bicycles, swing across rivers on dangling swings-just to get to school.” A festive celebration of formal and informal school settings in India—and of the ways children get to them—this book also reminds us that, while millions of children do get to go to school each day, millions of others don’t.

Published by Shakti for Children (now Global Fund for Children Books) in partnership with Charlesbridge, Going to School in India (2005) is written by Lisa Heydlauff, with photos by Nitin Upadhye, and designed by B.M. Kamath. Royalties from the sale of the book support educational initiatives in India. Click here to learn more about author Lisa Heydlauff’s projects and her Going to School non-profit.

On a related note, in her 2009 interview for PaperTigers, Maya Ajmera, founder and president of the Global Fund for Children talked about the “moment of obligation” she experienced, over 20 years ago, when she stepped out onto a bustling train platform in India and came across an open-air classroom where children were being taught how to read and write—a moment that led her to start The Global Fund for Children. This anecdote illustrates what our Pacific Rim Voices executive director, Peter Coughlan, loves to say: “A ripple can become a tidal wave, an acorn an oak tree.” GFC nowadays reaches millions of children and youth around the world, and supports hundreds of educational projects, including mobile boat schools for children in Bangladesh, night classes for women and girls in the red light districts of India, and countless more.

A ripple can indeed turn into a tidal wave of goodness.

In honor of the release of its latest children’s book, Our Grandparents: A Global Album, The Global Fund for Children invites everyone to submit an endearing, funny, or memorable story about their grandparents by posting a comment on their Facebook fan page by April 15. The author of the winning story will receive a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.com.

To learn more about The Global Fund for Children, read our interview with Maya Ajmera, founder and president of the organization.

We have yet to start the PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge in our household – the boys are getting geared up to have their first book read by the end of this month for their individual reads, but I’ve decided to wait till April to start on our readaloud together, to take advantage as much as possible of school holidays. They both seem to have so many different evening activities during term-time that reading to both of them at the same time has become a challenge in itself!

However, it is definitely time for a round-up of those people who have been reading already – and it’s great that the Challenge has been taken up for “grown-up” reading too. Sometimes I get so immersed in children’s books that I lose sight of books written for “my age” – but there are some fantastic booklists appearing on various blogs, which means that I now have an enormous list of books I want to read!

Susan at Black-Eyed Susan, from Detroit, Michigan, US, leapt in straight away with two books – Faith by Maya Ajmera, Magda Nakassis and Cynthia Pon (a Global Fund for Children Book/Charlesbridge, 2009) – which was recently a PaperTigers Book of the Month; and 14 Cows for America by Carmen Agra Deedy, Thomas Gonzalez, Wilson Kimeli Naiyomah (Peach Tree, 2009).

PaperTigers’ own Corinne, in Vancouver, Canada, has read The Shepherd’s Granddaughter by Anne Laurel Carter (Groundwood/House of Anansi, 2008).

Eva at A Striped Armchair, who lives in the U.S. Rockies, has already chosen the countries she is going to focus on in each continent and has put together what she calls a pool of books to choose from – I would call it a sparkling lake – if you’re looking for inspiration, dive in – so far, she has read The God Who Begat a Jackal by Nega Mezlekia. And an aside – just take a look at the wonderful maps Eva produced of the books she read in 2009…

Tiina at A Book Blog of One’s Own, in Helsinki, Finland, has posted reviews of her first two reads – she covered Asia in January with Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree by Tariq Ali and Europe in February with The River by Rumer Godden.

Edi at Crazy Quilts has also ticked off a couple of continents with one of my favorite reads of 2009, Rukhsana Khan’s Wanting Mor; and a new one to me that has gone onto my to-be-read list: The Other Hand by Chris Cleave – which she points out is published as Little Bee in the US.

Olduvai at Olduvai Reads, in the Bay Area of San Francisco, has also, like Eva, produced an extensive reading list for the countries she has chosen: Antarctica remains as Antarctica, then Morocco, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Portugal, Canada and Argentina… She’s already taken a couple of books out of the library and is reading Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler.

And what about you? If you haven’t joined the Reading the World Challenge yet, don’t worry, there’s still plenty of time. Find out about how it works here, and let us know what you’re reading..