Asia in the Heart, World on the Mind

This post is especially for readers outside the Philippines who have been wondering how they can celebrate Philippine National Children's Book Month. You can enjoy this children's book iPad app - in English and for FREE! Filipino children's book publisher Adarna House entered the iPad app market earlier this year by developing A Day in the Market , which is based on the Philippine National Children's Book Award-winning Araw sa Palengke written by May Tobias-Papa and illustrated by Isabel Roxas (published by Adarna House in 2008). A Day in the Market is excellent and FREE. Children are taken along a little girl and her mother's trip to the market, where the little girl is amazed by all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and other experiences. She promised her mother that she wouldn't point to things at the market and ask for them, and at the end of the day, the little girl is rewarded for her patience and obedience.     Two things are very im...

EDSA by Russell Molina and Sergio Bumatay III (Adarna House and the EDSA People Power Commission, 2013) is a picture book done right. It's the story of the Philippines' nonviolent 1986 EDSA Revolution presented as an interactive counting book. Children are treated to minimal text (in Filipino) and iconic images of the revolution, such as radios, yellow ribbons, military tanks, flowers, and thousands of Filipinos united. Molina used counting because, like counting, the EDSA Revolution was something that started quietly and then escalated. It's brilliant: Gently introducing the EDSA Revolution to children instead of force-feeding a history lesson or hitting them over the head with it. Children will be awed by the illustrations and will have fun counting the birds, soldiers, priests and nuns, supply trucks, and flags in the book, but they will also naturally ask questions about their stories. The book then becomes a springboard for family conversations and classroom dis...