Debtsa is a small agricultural community in the high mountains of southwest Ethiopia. It’s a hard 2-day drive from Addis Ababa, mostly on dirt roads. It is beautiful, it is remote. It’s challenging to get there, it’s challenging to stay there, and it’s especially challenging to leave. A piece of my heart is planted there […]
A New Library, A New Language for OHBD-RSG Books, More Big Dreams! Read More »
Process and Creative are often oxymorons. But with this project we needed to make them play nice together. We need to be creative without losing sight of our goals to create many culturally appropriate bilingual books for children in Ethiopia and beyond. And we needed process that would overwhelm or undermine being creative especially since
Creating children’s books is not an easy endeavor. My first children’s books took 10 years from writing the story, thinking I would illustrate it but not finding the time, then finding a busy illustrator and working through all the different versions to finally teaching myself to self-publish and releasing it into the world. Jane has
Open Hearts Big Dreams Creative Lead Jane Kurtz Honored with a Prestigious International “Reading Promoter” Award August 2022 – Open Hearts Big Dreams (OHBD) is delighted to announce that Jane Kurtz, who volunteers with OHBD as the creative lead on OHBD Ready Set Go Books (RSG), will be receiving an exceptionally high honor from the
We are delighted to kick off a series of posts celebrating our volunteer Creative Lead Jane Kurtz whose work with us (and others) was recognized by IBBY with a Reading Promoter Award. In a couple weeks, Jane will be accepting the award in Malaysia. Leyla and I are thrilled to be joining her. There is
I am an incoming High School Junior, founder of Linguistics Justice League (LJL) and a Youth Board Member of Invest in Youth. I have been working at the intersection of Data Science, NLP and ML, earning a Society of Women Engineers Next (SWE) STEM in Action award, National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) award
Hi! My title is Little Lion. My sentences are short because I like to teach kindergarten children who are just learning to put sounds to words. One of my best features is the colorful pictures on my pages. The children love looking at my pictures! They invite them into the story about life in Ethiopia.
OHBD RSG Book Distribution and Library Training in Gondar By Caroline Walker, Executive Director of Together We Learn (an OHBD collaborating organization) Access to reading materials is very important to the lives of the young people we work with. Across the country, many children do not have books at home. Those that do have access
OHBD RSG Book Distribution and Library Training in Gondar Read More »
How do we do it—pull meaning from symbols on paper, or from bits of light and dark in flickering electric impulses? This miracle is called reading. I learned to read in Maji, in deep southern Ethiopia. My mother taught me in my own childhood language of English. As I filled workbooks at our dining room
Learning to decode words — transforming marks on a page (or screen) into sounds in our brains — is one big reading skill. Learning to read those words fluently in sentences is another. The Creative Team considers those skills as we create Ready Set Go Books. But other skills are needed for understanding the sentences
Creating OHBD RSG Books to Enhance Reading Comprehension Skills Read More »