Looking for children's literature from around the world? So were the New York City educators who took part in WWB's recent summer seminar, "Instructional Leadership with Authentic Global Stories." Here are three gateways to exploring this literature we shared with them:
An eighty-year-old Mexican rancher who loves animals and ice-cold baths. An aspiring immigrant engineer who hopes to one day own a house with a “jardín de las rosas rojas” (garden of red roses.) A rural Dominican girl who fights for her own childhood. What do these people have in common?
Stuck in a hot place this summer? Escape to snowy Siberia in Yuri Rytkheu's "A Dream in Polar Fog," translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse. This novel excerpt tells the story of John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor who had a terrible accident in the Bering Strait, and is now being treated by a Chukchi shaman.
"It still stands there even if it is exposed to the wind and sun. . ."
—"the new colossus," by Jiawei, FDR High School
What does the Statue of Liberty mean to us today? Students at FDR High School in Brooklyn asked themselves this question; answering in multilingual poetry.