Read Africa

by Karen Leggett Abouraya

How often do you make a list for the grocery store and then leave the list at home and have to remember what you wrote down?  That is Fatima’s dilemma in Grandma’s List, a Children’s Africana Book Award winner by Portia Dery, illustrated by Toby Newsome. 

Calling Grandma’s List an excellent read-aloud book, Africa Access Review says the illustrations “show a neighborhood in Ghana that is very typical of many African towns with shops, gardens, small livestock, and many people outside working and playing. Children not familiar with West Africa can learn about palm nut soup, groundnuts (peanuts) and Bissap drink.”

Africa Access highlights the best books about Africa especially during its February Read Africa initiative but throughout the year as well.

Fatima has convinced her grandmother she can help with the chores on Grandma’s list of errands – but she loses the list and has to remember all the details, mixing up just about everything.  Contrary to expectations, Fatima’s family is very forgiving and she concludes that being a child isn’t so bad after all.

This is an excellent book for children to study the illustrations:

·       How does the dinner table look the same as yours? Different?

·       What about the village scene – what looks familiar? Can you draw a picture of your neighborhood on a Saturday morning?

·       Have children write their own list of grocery items or household tasks and imagine they lost the list. Ask them to write a paragraph about how they could help themselves remember items without that list.

·       Encourage children to consider the importance of details. Find out about cornflour – the kind Fatima mistakenly purchased – and write a paragraph about how it is used differently from wheat flour. Try to find a Ghanaian recipe using cornflour (usually called cornstarch in the United States).

·       Fatima doesn’t like her nickname “Fati.”  Do you have a nickname you like – or don’t like? Write about your nickname – or a nickname you would like to have.

There are more classroom ideas in the Africa Access Review of Grandma’s List as well as recommended picture books (Anansi Reads) and chapter books (Sankofa Reads), book marks and reviews of Children’s Africana Book Award winners. 

Children and teachers may add their own comments about the books they read at http://africaaccessreview.org/ - which becomes a student writing activity in itself.  It is also possible for students to submit videos or posters about the books they read, write a letter to the author or illustrator and even request a visit from a Read Africa Teaching Artist. 

 The 2018 CABA awards  will be celebrated with a reception on April 5 and a family festival April 6 at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.  

Read Africa

by Karen Leggett Abouraya

It’s almost Read Africa Week – that first week of February when Africa Access encourages everyone to kick off Black History Month with great books about Africa. There are lots of resources and booklists online, including the 2017 Children’s Africana Book Awards.

Let’s look at Chicken in the Kitchen, by Nnedi Okorafor, illustrated by Mehrdokht Amini (Lantana Publishing). Okorafor shares the masquerade culture of West Africa through a young Nigerian girl who fears – then adores – the giant chicken in her kitchen.

·       Ask students to write about someone they didn’t know or someone who scared them (even just a little) who later became a friend (or at least less scary). How did the change happen? How does that affect the way you meet new people now?

Chicken in the Kitchen also provides opportunities to talk about visual literacy. With Instagram stories and Snapchat images, television news and Twitter photos, images can galvanize a nation and even the world.  Are young people learning to interpret, gather information and take meaning effectively from images?

·       What does this image in Chicken in the Kitchen tell the reader about Anyaugo’s community? Here’s what the Africa Access reviewer  noticed. See how many of these observations your students notice.

o   “To the left we see two couples in traditional dress symbolizing gender parity in the production of yams; to the right musicians, also in traditional dress, play local instruments. The backdrop shows a town with houses and apartments rather than a rural setting. The children attending the masquerade sport Western dress and local designs.”

·       How do pictures help tell the story of Anyaugo and the chicken? Notice for example, how the Wood Wit appears in images before being mentioned in the text. How many Wood Wit images can your students find?

o   Ask children to write a letter to the Wood Wit asking for help with a task – and then pretend they are the Wood Wit and write a response. This could be a group project as well.

In my book Hands Around the Library: Protecting Egypt’s Treasured Books (a 2013 CABA winner) and its accompanying website, there are news photos from the 2011 Egyptian revolution that illustrator Susan L. Roth translated into cut-paper collages, adding rich interpretations to the story. 

·       Ask students to choose an interesting news photo or image and re-create it as a drawing, painting or collage. You can also provide random news photos to students and ask them to write a caption or paragraph; then compare their writing to an actual news account of the event in the photo.

Read Africa Week is an opportunity to focus attention on individual countries and stories from a continent many Americans know little about. It is also an opportunity to begin adding these stories to your year-round reading lists – along with attention to the increasing importance of visual literacy.

Storytellers -- CABA Awards

by Karen Leggett Abouraya

“There is a unique kind of magic that comes from hearing a story told. With only the power of a voice, an entire world can be created,” writes Evan Turk in the author’s note to the new book he wrote and illustrated, The Storyteller.

The Storyteller is one of this year’s Children’s Africana Book Award (CABA)  winners.  The awards honor books that contribute to an accurate, balanced picture of Africa.  The Storyteller takes place during a drought in the ancient Kingdom of Morocco. Only the power of storytelling is capable of filling everyone’s brass cup with water to share.

Encourage children to write their own story – and then share the stories out loud or with pictures. Talk about what makes a story so exciting that readers or listeners never get bored and keep wanting more.

·       Are there stories or legends you hear at home about the countries or places where your parents or grandparents were born?

·       Can you imagine a story to explain a natural phenomenon – like why fireflies sparkle at night, what the man (or lady) in the moon might be thinking or why pandas love to eat bamboo?

·       Write about a day in your life when something magic happens to you – like the boy in the story whose brass cup is suddenly overflowing with water.

Each of the 2017 CABA books could generate writing prompts – beginning with finding out more about the African country featured in each title.

The 2017 CABA Winners are:

·       Gizo-Gizo! A tale from the Zongo Lagoon (Ghana) by Emily Williamson with the students and teachers of the Hassaniyya Quranic School in Cape Coast Ghana/Sub-Saharan Publishers / available via African Books Collective

·       The Storyteller (Morocco) by Evan Turk/Atheneum

·       Amagama Enkululeko! Words for Freedom: Writing Life Under Apartheid (South Africa) Anthology/Cover2Cover/ available via African Books Collective

2017 CABA Honor Books

·       Aluta (Ghana) by Adwoa Badoe/Groundwood Books

·       The Bitter Side of Sweet (Ivory Coast) by Tara Sullivan/Putnam

·       The Boy Who Spat in Sargrenti’s Eye (Ghana) by Manu Herbstein / self-published for international distribution via Ingram Publishing Services /Techmate in Ghana

2017 CABA Notable Book

·       The World Beneath (South Africa) by Janice Warman/Candlewick

This is the 25^th anniversary of the CABA awards - 90 books set in 24 countries have been recognized since the awards began.  The authors of all seven 2017 winners will receive their awards at a celebration dinner November 3, 2017, in Washington, D.C.   

Ten previous winners are also attending the dinner, including Kathleen Wilson winner of the first CABA, five-time CABA winner E.B. Lewis and two-time winners Liz Zunon, Baba Wague Diakité and Ifeoma Onyefulu.  Ntshadi Mofokeng, representing the NGO Equal Education will be coming from South Africa, author Manu Herbstein will be traveling to the celebration from Ghana, Adwoa Badoe from Canada and Janice Warman from the U.K. Click here for tickets and more information. 

On Saturday, a free CABA family festival will be held at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.  Children can learn to spin a yarn and weave a story, based on tales from Ghana, Morocco and Ivory Coast.  A panel of CABA authors/illustrators is featured and both current and past CABA winners will be signing their books. The event is free and open to the public. More information here. 

“When a storyteller dies, a library burns.” Old Moroccan saying

 https://childrensbookguild.org/karen-leggett-abouraya

SHARING CULTURES WITH BOOKS

by Karen Leggett

The 2014 winners of the Children’s Africana Book Awards (CABA) have been honored this month in Washington, D.C., for writing the best children’s and young adult books on Africa published in the United States. The awards were started by Africa Access and the Outreach Council of the African Studies Association in 1991.

This year’s winners are:

• Desmond Tutu & Douglas Abrams, A.G. Ford (illus.) Desmond and the Very Mean Word  (Candlewick)

• Anna Cottrell & Agbotadua Togbi Kumassah, Kwabena Poku (illus) Once Upon a Time in Ghana (Afram)

• Monica Edinger, Robert Byrd (illus) Africa is My Home:Child of the Amistad (Candlewick)

• Mubina Kirmani, Tony Siema (illus.) Bundle of Secrets: Savita Returns Home (Create Space)

In social studies and language arts classes for any grade level, these books and the many previous award winners offer a perfect opportunity for cultural immersion and compare/contrast writing exercises on a very personal level.  

Ask each child to select one of the award-winning books - encourage your school library to begin collecting the CABA winners - or use other titles that focus on children or families in another country. As they read, children should keep a 3 x 5 card with notes that will enable them to answer three questions. The notes may simply be single words that will jog their memory later.

1.     How is your daily life similar to children in the book?

2.     What is different about your ordinary days and theirs?

3.     If you went to the country portrayed in the book, what would you most want to see or do?

Children may discover different ways of cooking a meal or cleaning clothes but they may also find what they have in common.  During a Skype session I moderated with American and Egyptian fourth graders, an American boy asked, “What is your favorite food?”  An Egyptian girl answered without hesitation, “pizza and hamburgers,” bringing surprised giggles and a palpable sense of connected-ness between children thousands of miles apart. 

If you want to expand the experience, find authors in other countries who want to do the same by visiting Skype in the Classroom or Global Friends.  The Africa Access website also has many teaching resources.

http://africaaccessreview.org/lessons/