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My Second Book: Tales for Two

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Recently won two Purple Dragonfly Awards for Excellence in Children's Literature (cultural diversity category, picture book for aged 6+ category). 

Available on Amazon (all net proceeds go to charity).

 

If you can't afford to buy the book or need the book for review, please feel free to download it for free here. 

As I showed the draft of Anthology 42 to my teachers, friends, and family, the idea for Tales for Two surfaced:

1.       My young cousins loved the rhymes in the book.

2.       I witnessed how my uncle encouraged critical thinking by asking the children open-ended questions on rhymes.

3.       My teachers who came from overseas related that they felt the book gave them and their children a small window              to understanding foreign values and cultures.

 

Thinking about their feedback, I decided to prototype this new picture book series targeted at younger children. It contains rhymes that I wrote based on fun and meaningful classic fables and stories from around the world. The first few books in my series draw from Chinese tales.  I will then move on to French, Spanish, and Arabic stories.

Tales for Two is a series of picture books based on traditional stories and proverbs from around the globe. Each book seeks to make learning English interactive, colorful, and fun, while also introducing children to wisdom tales they might not otherwise come across. Book One presents stories from ancient China.

 

Tales for Two is also about developing a mind of active listening and critical thinking rather than passive reading. The series is best read by an adult and a child together, hence the title.

 

But most of all, Tales for Two is about learning, appreciating, and understanding a diversity of beautiful values and people while reflecting on the commonality of humanity that ties us all together — our first step to a better tomorrow.

 

Nathan Chan and Jonathan Ji have created a wonderful story collection that allows adults and children to become partners in learning. Each of the three tales is a translated fable that allows the adult and child to delight in the characters’ challenges, choices, and outcomes and then to ask questions together. The illustrations are colorful, bold, and vibrant, and the fables are told in rhymed verse, the kind of musical language that stays with a child for years. The authors even invite an opportunity for readers to revisit the vocabulary used in the tales. This is a memorable book! What an impressive creation by these two young authors!

Marcel Gaultier, Head of School, Charlotte Country Day School, North Carolina, USA

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