Celebrate Multicultural Children’s Book Day With Beautiful Rainbow World

I am really honored and excited to share with you a very unique event that we are participating in called Multicultural Children’s Book Day. Before Christmas we signed up to participate in the 2015 Multicultural Children’s Book Day celebration. By signing up we received a book to review for free.

 

 

We were sent “Beautiful Rainbow World” created by Suzee Ramirez and Lynne Raspet. It is a very nice book that showcases all sorts of children in various countries having fun being children. The words of the book are the song “Beautiful Rainbow World”. The photographs were submitted by various photographers to create quite the treasured collection contained within the pages of this book.

A friend of mine had given us some wooden puppet blanks which I knew would be a perfect project for this book. What’s even better is that we made the puppets with our missionary friends who are back home from living a year in Africa. The mom modeled a traditional Liberian dress that would be worn during special celebrations.

At first the boys were skeptical about making puppets. I think they thought we were making dolls. Soon they saw all the fun that the girls were having and the had to join in. I had gathered up yarn, fabric scraps, ribbon, an old tie-dyed t-shirt, and some hot glue. The ages that worked on the puppets were between 4 years and 12 years old. To create skin colors that matched the kids they used colored pencils, crayons, and markers in various skin tones.

Here’s a close up of the book with the puppets:

We plan to play with our puppets in a homemade puppet stage made from a pizza box that has been decorated. We will be sure to share more details of that soon. Thanks for joining us as we help spread the word about Multicultural Children’s Book Day.

MCCBD Facts:

Our mission is to not only raise awareness for the kid’s books that celebrate diversity, but to get more of these of books into classrooms and libraries.

Mission: Despite census data that shows 37% of the US population consists of people of color, only 10% of children’s books published have diversity content. Using the Multicultural Children’s Book Day, Mia and Valarie are on a mission to change all of that. Their mission is to not only raise awareness for the kid’s books that celebrate diversity, but to get more of these types of books into classrooms and libraries. Another goal of this exciting event is create a compilation of books and favorite reads that will provide not only a new reading list for the winter, but also a way to expose brilliant books to families, teachers, and libraries.

 “MCCBD team hopes to spread the word and raise awareness about the importance of diversity in children’s literature. Our young readers need to see themselves within the pages of a book and experience other cultures, languages, traditions and religions within the pages of a book. We encourage readers, parents, teachers, caregivers and librarians to follow along the fun book reviews, author visits, event details, a multicultural children’s book linky and via our hashtag (#ReadYourWorld) on Twitter and other social media.”

The co-creators of this unique event are Mia Wenjen from Pragmatic Mom and Valarie Budayr from Jump Into a Book/Audrey Press.

Multicultural Children’s Book Day Non-Profit Collaborators

We’re also partnering with First Book to be able to offer a Virtual Book Drive that will help donate multicultural children’s books through their channels during the week of the event. We want to help get diversity books into the hands of kids who most need it and now we have a way to do it!

We are collaborating with Children’s Book Council to highlight wonderful diversity books and authors on an ongoing basis all year.

 

Our CoHosts: We have NINE amazing Co-Host. You can view them here.

Africa to America, All Done Monkey, The Educators’ Spin on It, Growing Book by Book, InCultural Parent, Kid World Citizen, Mama Smiles, Multicultural Kid Blogs, Sprout’s Bookshelf

 

MCCBD’s  2015 Sponsors include

Platinum Sponsors: Wisdom Tales Press, Daybreak Press Global Bookshop,

Gold Sponsors: Satya House,  MulticulturalKids.com,   Author Stephen Hodges and the Magic Poof,

Silver Sponsors: Junior Library Guild, Capstone Publishing, Lee and Low Books,  The Omnibus Publishing.

Bronze Sponsors:Double Dutch Dolls, Bliss Group Books,Author Richa Jha,  Rainbow Books,   Author FeliciaCapers,   Chronicle Books   Muslim Writers Publishing ,East West Discovery Press.