El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day), commonly known as Día, is a celebration every day of children, families, and reading that culminates yearly on April 30. The celebration emphasizes the importance of literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The ALSC shares some ideas for ideas for celebrating the importance of literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Here they are, paired with resources from NCTE and ReadWriteThink.org.
Celebrate children and connect them to the world of learning through books, stories and libraries.
- Find text suggestions from these podcast series, one for children in grades K-5 and another for grades 6-12.
- Plan a visit to a library to discover more about this magical place.
Nurture cognitive and literacy development in ways that honor and embrace a child’s home language and culture.
- This resolution builds on NCTE’s longstanding policies on students’ right to their own language.
- “Finding Voice: Learning about Language and Power” shares that voice can identify the writer, narrator, or character as a member of a certain generation, class, or ethnicity.
Introduce families to community resources that provide opportunities for learning through multiple literacies.
- What Do We Know about Multiple Literacies? a policy piece from NCTE presents numerous resources on the topic.
- In this ReadWriteThink.org Strategy Guide, you’ll see how one lesson utilizes tiered texts and multiple modalities in order to meet the learning style needs of students.
Recognize and respect culture, heritage and language as powerful tools for strengthening families and communities.
- This article presents the concept of heritage literacy, a decision-making process by which people adopt, adapt, or alienate themselves from tools and literacies passed on between generations of people.
- “Exploring Heritage: Finding Windows into Our Lives” details how eighth-grade students create memoirs after investigating family members’ stories, values, and culture.
For additional ideas for celebrating El día de los niños, El día de los libros/Children’s Day, Book Day, visit Pat Mora’s website, the American Library Association website, or the ReadWriteThink.org calendar entry.