Photo by Paola Gianturco from the book Celebrating Women
Rascals in Paradise, a service
of Casto Travel, San Francisco, makes it easy to vacation internationally with
your children or grandchildren. Want to go to...Europe, Africa,
the Caribbean, Central America, Asia, Oceania...but want American
children's menus? A crib? A high chair? Connecting rooms? A prescreened
baby-sitter? Casto's Rascals in Paradise takes
care of all that and even identify family-friendly resorts with children's
activities and shaded playgrounds. And, if you want to be sure
your kids have pals to play with, they will plan a 6-family group
trip (each family has its own baby-sitter so the adults can vacation, too;
a teacher escorts the tours, helps the kids learn a little
bit about the local language, history and culture, and
even invites local children over for play dates).
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Girl Scouts of Santa Clara County and Youth Philanthropy Worldwide have created the Women Worldwide Interest Patch. To earn it, girls learn to be a grant maker, design a logo for an overseas nonprofit, investigate laws around the world that protect women. Click here to find out more.
African
Princess, The Amazing Lives of Africa’s Royal Women. Girls ages 8+
will be enthralled with the complicated, dangerous lives of the
six women profiled
in this extraordinary new book, beginning with Hatshepsut of Egypt
who crowned herself pharaoh in the 15th century BC.
Throughout, the stunning watercolor portraits by Laurie McGaw, plus
photographs.
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Xanadu
Gallery’s Folk Art International Resources for Education is a nonprofit
program that lends masks, puppets, textiles, musical instruments
to schools, museums and art centers in Northern California. Kits
focus on Africa, China, Indonesia and
Mexico.
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Girl Scout founder Juliette
Low loved travel and her organization offers girls many global
opportunities. Members 14-17 can participate in Studio
B’s international programs such as surfing in Mexico or sea kayaking in Costa Rica.
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USA Girl Scouts Overseas helps expat Scouts to the
same excitement, fun, and adventures in Scouting as their stateside
sisters.
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The World Association
of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts
(WAGGGS) provides opportunities for
international
friendship and understanding among Scouts and Girl Guides from
144 countries.
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Waiting
to be Heard. Isabel Allende’s forward introduces
this volume in which young people
speak out about inheriting a violent world. Thirty -nine students
of San Francisco's Thurgood Marshall Academic High School use fiction,
poetry, and experimental writing to offer passionate, lucid statements
about personal, local, and global issues.
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Global Grover segments on Sesame
Street introduce kids and their cultures around the world.
Grover visits a six-year-old Chinese acrobat in one show, a girl
learning to play the Puerto Rican guiro in another. After 35 years,
Sesame Street now operates in 120 countries, working with local
educators to tailor its material.
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Children Just Like Me is a book by Anabel and Barnabas Kindersley, produced for DK Publishing
in conjunction with UNICEF. The authors traveled for almost two
years to more than 30 countries to meet, photograph, and talk
with the children featured in this book. In their next project, Celebrations, children from a wide range of countries
give a first-person account of how holidays are celebrated.
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The Merasi Counting Book, illustrated by Indra Banu
with bright folk art designs from Rajasthan, will help
children see beyond their own experience---and
learn to count to twenty in English and Hindi.
The book, inspired and supported by photographer
Barbara Goodbody, was produced by—and benefits—
the disenfranchised Merasi community, which has
an ancient musical heritage but is denied educational
and employment opportunities.
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The
Peace Book.
The abstract concept, peace, is difficult for kids under seven to understand.
This book relates the notion to making new friends, listening to different
kinds of music, and helping neighbors. With bright colors and
smiling characters, The Peace Book is timeless, universal
and can spark discussions in homes and classrooms. The book benefits
UNICEF.
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The People
Like Me show is a San Francisco
Bay Area performance series for kingergarten-to-sixth graders
who will like (and learn from) a curious character’s
quest to find his origins and roots. Searching for his lost
memory, he finds DNA, light and shadow, and gravity. Falling
up and growing
down, he encounters world dance and music from Korea, Poland, South America,
Indonesia, and West Africa. All are weekday school shows in February and March.
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Madam
President. The story of a 10-year- old girl who
wants to be president. This book introduces her to women foreign
leaders, presidential appointees, congresswomen and suffragists.
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The People Could Fly,
The Picture Book. Although the
original, beloved book was published 20 years ago, the 2004 edition
has new evocative, vivid images and features only the title story:
a magical African people lose their wings when they are shipped
to America as slaves. Yet one day the magic is recreated, and
the former winged people soar from the plantation to freedom. The New York Times called this book “A triumph
of words, pictures and storytelling.”
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Winona
LaDuke: Restoring Land and Culture in Native America. The
youngest person ever to speak before the United Nations is a 17-year-old
Native American girl, Winona LaDuke. After graduating from Harvard,
she returned to White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to build schools,
combat poverty and ecological destruction, and revive Anishinaabe
culture by recovering reservation lands. She helped found the indigenous
Women’s Network, and ran twice for US Vice President.
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Life
Like Mine: How Children Live Around
the World.
Profiles 18 children and explores what life is like for them and other young people
in 180 countries. Organized into four sections according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Survival, develop- ment,
protection and participation). It has a bounty of photographs,
charts and maps.
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The
Global Fund for Children supports community-based education groups around the world. Its publishing arm is Global Fund for Children Books. GFC President Maya Ajmera writes the wonderful photographic books that are about children in many countries. Titles include: Animal Friends, a Global Celebration of Children and Animals; Let the Games Begin (about games and sports kids play
in different places); Children from Australia to Zimbabwe; To be an Artist (ways children around the world express
themselves artistically) and Be My Neighbor (about communities,
with words of wisdom from Fred Rogers).
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Mulan is
based on a poem written more than a thousand years ago in which
a Chinese girl learns that her sick father will be conscripted
to fight invading
Huns. Knowing he could never survive, she decides to disguise herself and fight
in his place. Forbidden to speak directly to any man other than her father, she
ends up leading an all-male army and saving the Chinese empire.
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