Resources to Celebrate Multicultural Children’s Book Day All Year (guest post from Mia Wenjen)
Four and half years ago, Valarie Budayr of Jump Into a Book and I started Multicultural Children’s Book Day, an online holiday celebrated on January 27th to showcase diversity in children’s books. Our motivation was three fold:
Literacy: We believe that if children can see themselves in books, particularly at that crucial period of time when they are learning to read independently, they will be more motivated to read.
Empathy: On the opposite note, children are the most open to new ideas. Kids need to learn about others who are not like them and books provide that window into different experiences and minority points of view.
Discovery: The biggest hurdle for teachers and parents, we found, is finding those great multicultural and diverse books. Our holiday is about bridging that knowledge gap. In addition to free resources to find that perfect diversity children’s book, we also give FREE diversity children’s books to teachers and parents.
Diversity Children’s Book List Resource: FREE January 26 – January 31st!
This year we created a resource of book lists from 20 children’s book bloggers and 2 children’s book authors to help parents, caretakers, educators, librarians, KidLit lovers find the exact perfect diversity book they need. We are giving away our eBook FREE from January 26 through January 31 on Amazon. Our Kindle ebook, Read Your World: A Guide to Multicultural Children’s Books for Parents and Educators
, is $4.99. One hundred percent of proceeds goes to fund our Classroom Book Program where we gift free diversity children’s books to teachers for their classroom libraries.
