January 27 – It’s Creativity Month

About the Holiday

January is a time for reflection and new beginnings. What better time to start thinking creatively and finding your inner artist, scientist, inventor, thinker? Go ahead and do the thing you’ve always wanted to do!

Stitchin’ and Pullin’: A Gee’s Bend Quilt

Written by Patricia C. McKissack | Illustrated by Cozbi A. Cabrera

In this story told through poems, a little girl begins telling of her life, starting with a recitation on Gee’s Bend Women: “Gee’s Bend women are / Mothers and Grandmothers / Wives / Sisters and Daughters / Widows.” They are every kind of woman you know, doing every type of work and activity. “Gee’s Bend women are / Talented and Creative / Capable / Makers of artful quilts / Unmatched. / Gee’s Bend women are / Relatives / Neighbors / Friends— / Same as me.”

In Who Would Have Thought, the girl muses on how perceptions change. “For as long as anyone can remember,” she says, the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama have created quilts that were slept under, sat on, and wrapped around the sick or cold. But now those same quilts are “…hanging on museum walls, / their makers famous….”

When she was just a tot “Baby Girl” reveals in Beneath the Quilting Frame, she played under the quilting frame, listening to her “mama, grandma, and great-gran / as they sewed, talked, sang, and laughed / above my tented playground.” She remembers the “steady fingers /[that] pieced together colorful scraps of familiar cloth / into something / more lovely / than anything they had been before” as her mother sang her a lullaby.

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Image copyright Cozbi A. Cabrera, courtesy of Random House Books for Young Readers

In Something Else, “Baby Girl” is growing too big to play beneath the frame. Her legs becoming longer and her mind full of “recipes for eleven kinds of jelly…how to get rid of mold…and the words to a hundred hymns and gospel songs” while she waits her turn at the frame. Finally, in Where to Start? her time comes. The girl asks her mama how to begin and she answers, “‘Look for the heart. / When you find the heart, / your work will leap to life… / strong, beautiful, and… / independent.’”

In Remembering, the girl thinks about how her mama has told her that “cloth has a memory.” As she chooses the cloth that will become her quilt she sees the life and the history in each.

Nothing Wasted sees Grandma pulling apart a red-and-white gingham dress stitch by stitch to become a quilting square that the girl suddenly knows “will be the heart of my quilt.” In Puzzling the Pieces the girl and her grandma stand over the quilting frame fitting the squares together in the perfect way to tell the girl’s story. Her quilt comes together piece by piece to tell the history of Gee’s Bend in The River Island. The brown strips along three sides mirror the muddy waters surrounding her town. The fourth side is a green strip—“a symbol of the fields where my ancestors / worked cotton from can to can’t— / can see in the morning until / can’t see at night.” Lined up next to the green strip are six squares representing the small communities “where families with / the same name / are not kin by blood / but by plantation.”

Being Discovered is portrayed with “a large smoke-gray square”—the color of the Great Depression and the 15 minutes of fame Gee’s Bend garnered when discovered “by sociologists, historians, / educators, and journalists” who came and went, leaving Gee’s Bend “the way it had been / before being discovered.”

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Image copyright Cozbi A. Cabrera, courtesy of Random House Books for Young Readers

In Colors, the girl’s grandma explains the meanings and feelings behind each colored cloth. “Blue cools. / Red is loud and hard to control, / like fire and a gossiping tongue.” Green, orange, yellow, white, pink, and all the others have their own personalities. “Grandma says, / ‘Colors show how you / feel deep down inside.’”

In Pinky, the harrowing facts of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama frame the story of one marcher, Mr. Willie Quill who broke horses for the Alabama State Mounted Patrol and was saved from the Police attacks when one of the horses he’d trained knew his voice. In Dr. King Brings Hope, the little girl adds a “Patch of bright pink / to remember Pinky’s story. / Next to it I sew / a spotless white patch for the hope Dr. Martin Luther King / brought to the Bend” and goes on to tell how her grandma saw Dr. King at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church and what it meant to her.

By and By follows the girl as she adds “golden thank-yous, for James Reeb,” a “bright blue piece of velvet for Viola Liuzzo,” and a “big plaid people circle of white, black, brown, yellow, and red for Reverend Dr. King, all “killed for believing in justice.”

In the 1960s, The Sewing Bee tells, Gee’s Bend quilters were once again discovered. There were buyers for the handmade quilts, but stipulations. The girl asks her grandma if she was part of the Bee, to which she replies, “‘Yes, / more money. Less freedom. I chose to stay free.’”

At last all of the patches are laid out and the time comes to stitch the girl’s quilt. Five women stand at the frame “all stitchin’ and pullin.’” They work “in a slow and steady rhythm” relaxing and enjoying being together until the quilt is finished. In Finished, the last stitch is sewn, and the thread bitten and knotted. The girl has hundreds of ideas for future quilts. “Quilts that are about me, / the place where I live, / and the people / who have been here for generations.”

Further poems unite the history of “Baby Girl,” her family, and neighbors, and an Author’s Note about quilting and the women of Gee’s Bend follow the text.

Patricia McKessack’s free verse poems capture the close relationships and camaraderie of the generations of women who join around the quilting frame to share and pass down their art and their heart. McKessack’s conversational verses, on page after page like the patches of a quilt, reveal the complexity of this handmade art form in the way intimate talks between friends unveil a life. Readers learn not only about the little girl and her own thoughts, but the history and influence of her immediate family, world events, inspirational figures, and deeply held beliefs that make her who she is and ties her to the other Gee’s Bend women.

Cozbi A. Cabrera’s stunning acrylic paintings take readers inside the heart of the Gee’s Bend women, depicting the girl’s home, the table-sized quilting frame where the women collectively work, the plantations, the protests, and the changes that came but did not unravel the convictions, values, and love of the little girl’s family. Readers can almost hear the talking and singing of the Gee’s Bend women as they stitch their quilts, and the comforting, embracing environment is evident on every page. Cabrera’s portraits of the little girl, her mama, and her grandma are particularly moving. For What Changed, Cabrera depicts a yellow school bus appearing on the dirt road from the right hand corner of the page. In the side mirror a dot of a house comes into view, reminding readers that no matter how far these women are from home, Gee’s Bend is always with them.

Children—and adults—will find Stitchin’ and Pullin’: A Gee’s Bend Quilt inspirational and uplifting. This volume of poetry can be read at one sitting and delved into again and again, making it a wonderful choice for home libraries and a must for school, public, and other libraries.

Ages 5 – 12

Dragonfly Books, Random House, 2016 (paperback edition) | ISBN 978-0399549502

View a gallery of fashion designs, dolls, and other handmade art work by Cozbi A. Cabrera on her website!

Creativity Month Activity

Design a Quilt Coloring Pages

Quilts are so much more than pieces of material sewn together—they’re life stories! Here are two quilt coloring pages for you to design and color. What does each piece mean to you? As you color each section, write a sentence about an event or thought that is important to you.

Quilt Template 1 | Quilt Template 2

Picture Book Review

January 25 – A Room of One’s Own Day

Posted by Kath Carroll

About the Holiday

Everyone needs a little space of their own—a place to think, read, write, or just say Ahhhh… after a long day. In today’s world of Man Caves and Women’s Sheds, designing a spot where you can get away and spend some rejuvenating alone time doing a particular hobby or just doing nothing is becoming easier and more accepted. Kids need their own spaces too—a personal place surrounded by the things they love.

My Very Own Room / Mi propio cuartito

Written by / Escrito por Amada Irma Pérez | Illustrated by / Ilustrado por Maya Christina Gonzalez

One morning a little girl woke up in a bed overrun with brothers. Victor’s elbow was poking her in the ribs, and Mario was curled up on the pillow with his leg across her face. In the next bed slept the girl’s three other brothers. The girl had had enough—after all she was nearly 9 years old. After years of sharing a room with her five brothers, “more than anything in the whole world [she] wanted a room of [her] own,” but space in her tiny house was hard to come by. What’s more, besides the eight immediate family members, sometimes friends and relatives from Mexico came to stay. It could be fun, but there was no privacy.

To get away she sometimes crept out early in the morning and climbed “the crooked ladder that leaned against the elm tree” in her backyard. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her brothers, she just needed a place of her own. She looked around the house for a space that would be just right. She peeked behind the flour-sack curtain that divided the living room from the storage closet. It seemed perfect! She imagined it with her “own bed, table, and lamp—a place where she could read the books she loved, write in her diary, and dream.”

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Image copyright Maya Christina Gonzalez, courtesy of Lee & Low Books

While the storage nook seemed the solution, the girl’s mother shook her head. The space was already assigned to her aunt’s sewing machine, her uncle’s garden tools, furniture, and old clothes—the things needed for others to make a better life in America. But then her mother saw the tears in her daughter’s eyes and decided that perhaps the things in the storage space could find a new home on the back porch with blankets and a tarp to protect them from the weather.

With a hug and a kiss, the little girl thanked her mother, and they and the five boys began rearranging the house. Finally, all that was left behind the flour-sack curtain were a few cans of leftover paint. There was blue, white, and pink, but not enough of any one color to paint the room. Suddenly, the girl had an idea. She and her brothers mixed the three together and made…magenta! Tío Pancho offered a spare bed and after measuring the room and then the bed with a piece of yellow yarn, the little girl discovered that the bed would indeed fit. An upended wooden crate became a nightstand. But what about a lamp?

Mamá brought out her box of Blue Chip stamps that she’d been collecting for years. The stamps were awarded with gas and food purchases. When they were stuck into booklets and used at special stores, the stamps were as good as money. The girl and her brothers “licked and licked and pasted and pasted.” When they were finished, they all went to the stamp store. As soon as she stepped into the store, the girl spied the lamp she wanted. “It was as dainty as a beautiful ballerina, made of white ceramic glass with a shade that had ruffles around the top and bottom.”

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Image copyright Maya Christina Gonzalez, courtesy of Lee & Low Books

Back home she carefully set the lamp on her bedside table, but “something was still missing, the most important thing…Books!” The next day the little girl brought home six books from the library—six was her “lucky number because there were six children” in her family. That night, the little girl nestled into her new room, turned on the light and began to read. When her two youngest brothers peered in through the curtain, she invited them in, and as they snuggled on her bed, she read them a story. At the end they said goodnight, and her brothers returned to their own room. Lying back against her pillow, the girl felt “like the luckiest, happiest little girl in the whole world” because each person in her family had worked to make her wish come true. She drifted off into peaceful sleep under a “blanket of books” in her very own room.

Amada Irma Pérez’s touching story from her own childhood is a delightful reminder for readers of the strong bonds of family love that puts other’s needs ahead of one’s own. The family’s commitment to each other is found not only in their willingness to help rearrange the house to accommodate a maturing daughter and sibling, but in the collection and storage of goods that will contribute to a better life for friends and relatives. Children familiar with reward points will be fascinated to learn about their predecessor “blue chip stamps.” The straightforward storytelling is infused with the kinds of hopes and suspense that resonate with kids, and the tender, quiet ending leaves readers with a lingering feeling of comfort and happiness.

Maya Christina Gonzalez fills the pages of My Very Own Room with joyous vibrancy and empathy that emphasizes the family’s connection. Soft edges and swirling patterns create a comforting environment, while elements, such as the long piece of yellow yarn, underscore the familial ties. While the little girl finds solace in the backyard elm tree and hunts for a space to call her own, her mother looks on with understanding, which leads to depictions of mother and daughter that are particularly moving. With warmth and welcome, each page invites readers into the family home to share a transitional event in their life.

The text is presented in both English and Spanish on each page, and is followed by a brief biographical note, including photographs, by Amada Irma Pérez.

It’s heartening to read a story in which siblings are so immediately supportive of each other. The gentle pace and upbeat tenor of My Very Own Room makes it a wonderful choice for quiet family story times or group school or library readings.

Ages 5 – 10

Lee & Low Books, 2008 | ISBN 978-0892392230

Learn more about Amada Irma Pérez and her books on her website!

Discover a gallery of book illustration and fine art by Maya Christina Gonzalez plus resources for educators on her website!

A Room of One’s Own Day Activity

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Decorate Your Room Coloring Page

If you had a room to fix up just the way you’d like, how would it look? Here’s a printable Decorate Your Room Coloring Page for you to enjoy. Put your own knick-knacks on the shelf and your things on the nightstand by the bed. Then give your room a color scheme – and move in!

Picture Book Review

January 24 – It’s National Hobby Month

Posted by Kath Carroll

About the Holiday

The idea of hobbies—something useful, purposeful, and fun done in one’s spare time—has been around at least since 1676 when Sir Matthew Hale wrote in Contemplations Moral and Divine that “Almost everyone hath some hobby horse or other wherein he prides himself.” Later, in the mid-1800s when work ceased to consume every hour of the day, and people had more time for leisure pursuits, hobbies became more popular. Today, it may be interesting to consider that many of our current hobbies—knitting, sewing, woodworking, candle making, etc.—were once the work of our ancestors. To celebrate this month’s holiday, try a new activity—it may turn into a favorite!

More-igami

Written by Dori Kleber | Illustrated by G. Brian Karas

Joey was a little boy with a particular fascination. He was captivated by all things folded. At home he had a collection of “old road maps,” the bellows on an accordion made it his favorite instrument, and he even tucked himself into a foldaway bed at night. One day Joey witnessed the most amazing thing at school. Sarah Takimoto’s mother came to his class, and—right before the students’ eyes—folded, flipped, and pulled a plain white piece of paper “until it became…a crane.”

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Image copyright G. Brian Karas, text copyright Dori Kleber. Courtesy of Candlewick Press

“Joey’s eyes popped. His jaw dropped. Mrs. Takimoto called it origami.” Joey was smitten. “‘I want to make origami,’” Joey told Sarah’s mother. “‘Will you teach me?’” Mrs. Takimoto answered that while she could teach him the right folds, it would take practice and patience to become an origami master. Joey raced home that afternoon and began folding. When he ran out of notebook paper and construction paper, he used his homework…the newspaper…his sister’s sheet music…gift wrap… even “Aunt Vivian’s pineapple surprise” recipe card. But when he folded up all thirty-eight dollars in his mom’s purse, she put her foot down.

“Joey drooped.” His cranes were still coming out wrinkled and crooked, and he’d never be able to become an origami master without practicing. To soothe his disappointment, he headed next door to Muy Mexicana for some fajitas. Right away Mr. Lopez noticed Joey’s disgruntlement. When Joey explained that everyone was losing patience with him, Mr. Lopez said, “‘Many artists are misunderstood, amigo.’ Especially when they are just learning.’” Mr. Lopez went into the kitchen, and when he came out with the sizzling fajitas, he was delighted to see a napkin pyramid sitting on the table.

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Image copyright G. Brian Karas, text copyright Dori Kleber. Courtesy of Candlewick Press

Joey apologized, but Mr. Lopez thought it made the table look fancy. In fact, he liked it so much that he had Joey fold every napkin on every table. After that, Joey went to Muy Mexicana each day following school and folded the napkins into decorative shapes. One day he made fans, the next candlesticks, and the day after that, crowns. He patiently worked until each one was perfect.

Finally, he felt ready to attempt his original challenge. “He took a crisp napkin. He folded. He flipped. He pulled.” When he was finished, a perfect crane sat in front of him. Just then a girl with a paper fan walked in. Her eyes widened as they zeroed in on Joey’s crane. Joey offered to show her how to make it, but warned, “‘It takes practice—and lots of patience!’”

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Image copyright G. Brian Karas, text copyright Dori Kleber. Courtesy of Candlewick Press

Dori Kleber’s unique multicultural story of a little boy who finds the perfect creative outlet for his singular interest will captivate kids who are just beginning to try their own hands at favorite hobbies, schoolwork, or other pursuits. With humor and honest depictions of Joey’s frustration and persistence, Kleber shows readers that practice and patience really do pay off. As Joey meets another folding enthusiast, kids will see that there are always others with whom to share favorite pastimes.

Opening More-igami to the first page where Joey sits gazing lovingly at a taco with a folded napkin next to his plate, readers will know they are in for something special. As always, G. Brian Karas’s characters are enthusiastic, encouraging, and adorable. Readers will empathize with Joey as they watch him folding and folding, and giggle at the many, many practice cranes that litter his home, even perching atop his sister’s music stand and appearing in his mom’s purse.

Karas makes full creative use of the origami theme in his clever page designs and illustrations, beginning with the square shape of the book itself and the origami paper-styled endpapers. Vivid, solid-color background pages are divided diagonally, vertically, or horizontally with subtle changes in hue or nearly invisible lines. In depictions of Joey’s school, home, and favorite restaurant, diagonals, angles, and sharp edges predominate: tables and floors create triangles on the page; windows, walls, and doors divide pages into shapes associated with the steps of origami’s folded creations; and floor tiles, the sidewalk, and even Joey’s shirt portray grid lines. The color schemes of each page, inspired by the patterns and shades of origami paper, are dazzling and unite the varied aspects of this special book.

For any child undertaking a new activity or venture, More-igami is a charming and encouraging companion on the way to proficiency—one that would make a wonderful home library addition.

Ages 4 – 8

Candlewick Press, 2016 | ISBN 978-0763668198

To learn more about Dori Kleber and her writing, visit her website!

G. Brian Karas has a whole gallery of illustrations, books, information, and “what nots” on his website!

National Hobby Month Activity

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Origami Pets

Origami is a fun hobby that can grow in complexity as you gain skill. Here are two templates to get you started! All you need is a square piece of paper and—if you’d like to decorate your piece—some markers or colored pencils.

Puppy Template | Penguin Template

Picture Book Review

December 23 – Roots Day

Posted by Kath Carroll

About the Holiday

Roots Day was established to inspire us to look into our family background and learn about our heritage. It’s fascinating to discover facts about our ancestors’s lives and the stories that have come down from generation to generation. If you will be with family this weekend, talk about your collective history and get to know each other in a whole new way!

Mango, Abuela, and Me

Written by Meg Medina | Illustrated by Angel Dominguez

During the winter Mia’s Abuela moves from her house far away to live with her family. Mia feels shy around her unfamiliar grandmother, but quickly adapts, sharing her room and her drawer space. The one thing they cannot share is language. Abuela “can’t unlock the English words” in Mia’s book, and Mia knows only a little Spanish.