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 »
My educational journey started in Gambella, Ethiopia where I was born. Growing up, I never had nongovernmental printed Anuak books. The school provided textbooks which we always returned at the end of each year. Since the schools couldn’t afford to print new copies each year, we were always given the same recycled books. It’s only
Preserving a Rare Ethiopian Language for the Anuak People of Gambella Read More »
When Daniel Aklilu and I connected on Facebook, he generously offered to illustrate a #RSG book for us. I sent him a title from our new inclusion series, which is part of the Mike Carr Legacy project. Each day he would work on one illustration and share it with me via Messenger then I would
Connecting through art, social media, and stories Read More »
