tessa welch's List: Afr Storybook

Children's books

Project that has resulted in the creation of 3000 books since 2010. 

Free cut up and take-home books from this website, which is a phonics based approach to teaching reading in English. 

10 downloadable published stories 

What is Mama Lisa's World?




Mama Lisa's World is the internet's premier destination for children's songs from around the globe and for discussions of international culture. It features thousands of traditional songs from over a hundred countries and cultures and a major collection of English Mother Goose Rhymes. Mama Lisa's Blog focuses on global recipes and cuisine, holiday traditions, and lively conversations about childhood and customs around the world.




What was the guiding principle behind Mama Lisa's World?




The intent of this site is to give people a sense of the nursery rhymes and songs sung by or to children in cultures around the world. For example, "Yankee Doodle" is a little rhyme that all American children know and experience as a part of their childhood. Non-Americans can get a sense of a small part of the culture of the United States by reading or singing it.




How do you deal with the issue of translations?




We see the spirit of the rhyme as being more important than the literal meanings of the words. Obviously, no translation can do full justice to all the nuances and senses a rhyme or any other piece of art hits in its native language and culture. But we make do with what we can...

Zimbabwean stories 

The Stories for Everyone Facebook page with a lot of the stories for everyone.

There is a better address for this library now - http://en.childrenslibrary.org/
The purpose of the ICDL is to promote tolerance through making the best children's literature available digitally. It gets the rights to create e-book versions of published children's literature, and invites volunteer translations into multiple languages through a separate website. These translations are cross checked before being posted. But readers can also improve textbook translations.
The majority of the stories appear to be Persian/Farsee, but there are also quite a few Phillipine and Maori and Spanish texts that would appeal to African kids. The African languages available are Kiswahili and Kinyarwanda, as well as some Afrikaans. The site has some good ideas for how to use the digital books, and is also encouraging kids' own book creation through storykit apps for ipads. There is a featured books section, and an award winning books section - both of which are good features.
The ICDL has been visited by over three million unique visitors since our launch in November, 2002.
The ICDL collection includes 4643 books in 61 languages.
Highly sophisticated search engine: by country, continent, language, age, cover, genre.
Certain of the books are translated into different languages, sometimes with two languages in the same book, and sometimes different language versions.
The ICDL makes use of volunteers, but essentially gets the rights from publishers to post e-book versions of their books, accompanied by bibliographic information, as well as interesting information about the authors.
Most of the books are All Rights Reserved.
There are three types of e-reading formats, and on the most recently added books, users can also click to enlarge (and copy) text. However, you can't download whole books.
There is the possibility for an Adopt a Country programme. Perhaps a good idea for Kenya, South African and Uganda??