Making food joyful—even while educating on food insecurity—is a tall order for a children’s show. But Waffles + Mochi is a show like no other.
Tag: Children’s Literature
When the Writing Takes Over the Writer
Louise Fitzhugh, author of Harriet the Spy, and the poet James Merrill were joined by friendship, craft, and graphomania: the compulsion to write.
Digging up Whiteness
We may imagine that young people are innocent of the implications of race and class in American culture, that they can grow up in a kind of bubble of protection, safely insulated from the vexed and ...
Trump Is a Liar. Tell Children the Truth.
Rich Rump is an ill-tempered “rich man” who accidentally receives Santa Claus’s pants from the dry cleaners and then refuses to return them. Featured in ...
The 90-Second Newbery: An Interview with James Kennedy
“Trade and plum-cake forever, huzza!” So said John Newbery, the 18th-century ...
Empathy Is Not Enough
Almost 30 years ago, education researcher and children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop introduced an analogy that has been widely embraced by the librarians, teachers, artists, and scholars ...
Picturing Freedom
Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life by Ashley Bryan enriches a fragmentary archive by tapping into something we know for sure about the enslaved but seldom allow ourselves to explore ...
Refugee Stories for Young Readers
Today, more than half of the world’s refugees are children under the age of 18. That’s nearly 50 million young people, making this the worst child refugee ...
Losing Their Religion
Rarely do we pity the pious Victorian patriarch. Why should we sympathize with the privileged men who stoutly believed that God had placed them at the apex of a “Great Chain of Being”? One of the ...
In the Great Green Room: Margaret Wise Brown and Modernism
When Goodnight Moon was published in 1946, no one predicted it would become a classic. Its sales began to take off in 1953, and now the book has sold over 14 million copies. I grew up with Goodnight ...
The Teflon Kid: How Annie Enables Apathy About Inequality
What’s not to like about seeing an adorable black child nestled up with a baby animal on the cover of the New York Times Style Magazine? The composition of this shot links child actor Quvenzhané ...
The Mixed-Up Kids of Mrs. E. L. Konigsburg
Imagine that you are a children’s book editor. An unproven writer who has only recently sold her first story sends you her second effort. The manuscript opens with a rich old lady’s note to her ...
Good Morning iPad: Technology in 21st-Century Picture Books
After teaching her class the “Star light, star bright” rhyme, my son’s preschool teacher invited each child to express a wish to be inscribed onto a paper star for them to decorate. Lousy with ...