Hola!


Welcome to our blog!
This blog focuses on culturally authentic, Mexican/Latino children's literature and the authors that produce this literature. To learn more about the featured authors, click on their pictures in the left hand column to go directly to their personal web pages or biographies.

As the authors of this blog, we are both currently graduate students in the literacy program at SUNY Fredonia. We have been learning a lot about multicultural literature and how to tell whether this literature is authentic or not based on many different aspects including: language, audience, illustrations, and author style.

Although there is not one definition for cultural authenticity, we believe, much like Howard (1991) that "readers from the culture will know that it is true, will identify, and be affirmed, and readers from another culture will feel that it is true, will identify, and learn something of value, sometimes merely that there are more similarities than differences among us" (p. 92).

We have chosen 10 books from the Mexican/Latino culture that we believe to be authentic. We chose to focus on Mexican/Latino culture because it is not as highly represented in children's literature as African American or Asian American. Because we are both passionate about children's literature we decided to take a closer look at a culture that seems more underrepresented. Each blog post will focus on a different children's book and we will outline why we believe these particular books are authentic while allowing you to become more familiar with their authors and giving ideas of how to incorporate this particular book into a classroom.

We hope you enjoy the blog and would love to hear what you think!

Kayla & Amanda


Howard, E. F. (1991). Authentic multicultural literature for children: An author's perspective. In M. V. Lindgren (Ed.), The multicolored mirror: Cultural substance in literature for children and young adults (pp. 91-99). Fort Atkinson, WI: Highsmith.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Book Fiesta! by Pat Mora


This Pura Belpre Award winner is a great book for children K-2 to celebrate El dia de los ninos! This is a historical fiction book about the Mexican celebration of The day of the child on April 30th. Pat Mora decided to extend the celebration and make it El dia de los ninos/El dia de los libros! to celebrate books as well. This book goes through the many places that children read on this day and the places their imagination takes them.


We believe this book is authentic because El dia de los ninos is an actual day celebrated on April 30th to celebrate children. This book can be used as a good introduction to what the day includes for young readers. This is a bilingual book with colorful and appealing pictures. At the end of the book, there is a letter from Pat Mora herself addressing the idea of book fiestas and the celebration of children and books which allows the reader to understand the author's reason for writing this book.


A K-W-L chart can be used as a pre, during, and post activity for this book. For the pre-reading activity, students discuss what they already know about El dia de los ninos and what they want to know. During reading, students can fill in information in the learned section of the chart. As a post-reading activity, students extend the learned section of the chart into a research activity to add what they learned from the book. Another post reading activity could be to have an actual book fiesta day in the classroom on April 30th, or another day dedicated to celebrate children and books!






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