Creating Children's Literature With Room To Read

Last month I had the opportunity to work with a team of educators to lead a conference with the Nepali faculty of Room To Read, a wonderful international NGO with the motto, "World change starts with educated children".   Quoting from the organization's web page (http://www.roomtoread.org/AboutUs):

We envision a world in which all children can pursue a quality education, reach their full potential and contribute to their community and the world. To achieve this goal, we focus on two areas where we believe we can have the greatest impact: literacy and gender equality in education.  We work in collaboration with communities and local governments across Asia and Africa to develop literacy skills and a habit of reading among primary school children, and support girls to complete secondary school with the life skills they’ll need to succeed in school and beyond.

Our workshop, held in Kathmandu, was titled, "Child Centered Pedagogy for Language and Literacy Skills", and consisted of six sessions over the course of three days.  I led three of these sessions and used the time to create a children's writing workshop for the participants.  Since promotion of quality children's literature is one of the cornerstones of Room to Read's mission, I worked with a Nepali colleague to include read-aloud sessions in English and Nepali at the beginning, end and midway through each day's session.  For the rest of the time we worked on creating original books of our own: first a group book based on the participants' experiences observing children in the nearby neighborhood and then individual books composed, bound and illustrated by each educator.

For the rest of this post I'll focus on the read-aloud portion of the workshop.  Then I'll discuss our writing experience.  But first a note on language.

I do not speak Nepali, so obviously all of my teaching was conducted in English and the Room to Read faculty are all English speakers.  For obvious reasons, however, it was important that Nepali writing and language be an important component of our work.  Room to Read is an advocate for creating and promoting children's literature in the local languages of the regions where they work and I wanted to build skills and tools to enrich the workshop participants' contributions to that mission.   For this reason I worked alongside my colleague Ms. Bandana Aryal, a Nepali teacher at the Rato Bangala School.  Bandana conducted some of our read-aloud sessions, selecting Nepali children's literature to share with the group.  Participants were encouraged to compose their books in either English or Nepali and Bandana was consultant on language and composition for those who chose Nepali (our group book was in Nepali as were most of the individual titles).

For more on Nepali children's literature, see my blog post from 2009 on Rato Bangala Kitab (Rato Bangala Books)  http://educationalalternativesworldwide.blogspot.com/2009/03/rato-bangala-kitab-quality-childrens.html. 

The English read-aloud books I chose included the following titles:

The Artist Who Painted A Blue Horse, by Eric Carle.

Hairs, by Sandra Cisneros, illustrated by Terry Ybanez.

The Eric Carle book is a simple, beautiful story of one artist's commitment to resisting conventionality.  It's suitable for young children, but if using it with adults be sure and include the tribute in the back to the German expressionist painter Franz Marc.  Sandra Cisneros' Hairs is in both English and Spanish and, as advertised, is all about hair - its varied textures, colors and styles.  

As I stated earlier, Bandana and I tried to include at least three read-aloud experiences per session.  There is no better way to teach the techniques we hope educators will use with children than to model those very techniques, using the best tools at our disposal.   Both of the books I've cited are wonderful examples of quality literature and there is so much more available.  What titles would you choose?