Asia in the Heart, World on the Mind

See You in the Cosmos by Jack Cheng (Dial Books for Young Readers, 2017) "My name is Alex Petroski and my house is in Rockview, Colorado, United States of America, planet Earth. I am eleven years and eight months old . . ." Filipino American Alex Petroski LOVES astronomy. His hero is Carl Sagan, the astronomer who sent a "Golden Record" out into space. In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. In case the spacecraft ever made contact with extraterrestrial life forms, or future humans, each had on board a "Golden Record," a copper phonograph LP featuring a collection of sounds and images meant to portray the life and culture on planet Earth. The recorded sounds included things like wind, thunder, bird songs, greetings in 55 languages, and the brainwaves of a woman in love. (You can actually listen to the audio of the Golden Record here .) Alex has built his very own rocket, Voyager 3, and plans to launch it into space at SHARF (Sout...

Helloooooo to all my fellow English teachers in Malaysia and Singapore. Please encourage your students to join the Scholastic Writers' Award 2014! If you are in Malaysia, check out this link . And if you are in Singapore, check out this link . :o)

The Children's Literature Association of the Philippines, Inc. (CLAPI) invites you to "Reading Beyond Borders," a forum on: * building proficiency in language through reading, * creating awarenss of the K to 12 reading program, and * adopting and applying appropriate reading strategies to instill the love for books and reading. "Reading Beyond Borders" will be on Tuesday July 16, in the P. Gomez Elementary School auditorium, Sta. Cruz Manila, from 8 a.m. to 12 noon. The registration fee is only PhP300.

Shweta Ganesh Kumar shared with me this TED Talk from novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about how "a single story" about another person or country can cause critical misunderstanding, and I felt that the talk really reflected why I started this blog. Please watch it below, if you haven't already: I sometimes teach creative writing to children and teens and have been very shocked to see that the first impulse of my students - all Filipinos or Chinese Filipinos ages 11-15 - is to write stories featuring characters with blond hair and blue eyes. It seems that, like the seven-year-old Adichie, my students have "a single story" about what literature is and do not think that people like them can exist in literature. (Needless to say, I am now trying to expose my students to more Filipino literature and literature from other Asian countries.) I blog because our students, nieces and nephews, children, grandchildren, and godchildren NEED AND DESERVE more than "a ...