Multicultural Picturebooks: Art for Illuminating Our World - Tapa blanda

In this second edition, authors Sylvia and Ken Marantz...continue to explore the way multicultural picture books function to foster global understanding, a key objective in today's diverse classrooms....This is a valuable resource for locating a recently published story from a specific cultural context, and the detailed expositions on the artwork make it equally useful for illustration studies. * The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books * ...a resource text for elementary teachers, librarians, and parents; most works listed are targeted to children in K-4, but are also suitable for older children. Organized into five geographical areas and a section on the immigrant experience, the entries include author, title, illustrator, publisher and publication date, number of pages, and brief descriptions of the plot and the look and style of the artwork. For the second edition, the authors have deleted texts no longer in print, added new works published since 1997, and changed the title from the earlier Multicultural Picturebooks: Art for Understanding Others. * Reference and Research Book News *

"Picturebook," spelled as a single word to identify its unique qualities and to differentiate the genre from other books with illustrations, is one that tells a story either in pictures alone or in almost equal partnership with text. The picturebook has great potential for bridging the differences among us; the concept of a story is one common to all, a shared experience that sets the stage for communication. And the goal of multiculturalism is to emphasize the positive attributes of human society, the outstanding, rather than the stereotype. Because children born today will interact with people from different cultures much more than previous generations, it is important that they are taught about other cultures, starting at a young age. Multicultural picturebooks are, therefore, an excellent teaching tool for meeting this educational challenge. The picturebooks profiled are appropriate for children in grades K - 4 but can be used with older children, depending on the curriculum and the students' comprehension level. Books covering Asia and the Pacific, The Middle East, Africa, South America, North America (Native Americas, Inuit, etc.), and books specific to the immigrant experience are profiled. Each book is described in one paragraph that includes an engaging review of the story line, special features of the content, the look and style of the artwork, interior design, and layout of the book. The authors emphasize that the visual qualities of picturebooks affect their ability to tell stories about people whose values and behaviors are different from those of the reader.