Monday, September 14, 2009

"Just a little bit magic"






You must go to this site - KidsLibs - a project to bring libraries to children in poor neighborhoods in Nairobi and also rural Laikipia in Kenya.
This is a boy outside a library in Sipili. Bikes are among items on the wish list for each of the four libraries that librarian Anne Moore has created so far.
Kids at the Mathare North center gathered with Susan Phillips to read stories, talk about the kinds of stories they liked, then created characters for their own stories which they wrote and illustrated. You can read a series of stories about Thomas and Queenventure: "Once upon a time in the city of Mombasa lived a beautiful girl named Queenventure." Read more.

You will also see poems, pin hole photography (the first photo above was created in Mathare North), and sunprints created by kids in library programs. "Just a little bit magic" was the way Susan described the pinhole photographs.
The libraries themselves are a lot of magic for Kenyan kids. Do you live near one of Kenya's kidslibs libraries? Would you write us a comment about books you like or what you like to do there?

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Connections: children's books and adult literacy




Welcome to a Newsletter from Connections, a literacy program of the New Hampshire Humanities Council.
Check out the stories in the newsletter - about a Night of Stories, a bilingual Somali-English folktale, Naomi Shihab Nye's poem, "Kindness", and haikus, too! Photos by Sue Butman of the New Hampshire Humanities Council. Thank you, Sue. Here are photos of people who gathered for Night of Stories to celebrate stories in books and music. On the left is Theo Nii Marty, a percussionist from Ghana. It was a wonderful night. Theo had all of us - people of all ages from all over the world - up there dancing.