Library

IBBY Ethiopia and Open Hearts Big Dreams Announce Exciting New International Developments

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Yoseph Ayalew phone: 251 965 696 969 / 911 227 650 / email: yosephopenheartbigdreams@gmail.com Ellenore Angelidis phone: 425-295-8841 / email: ellenore@openheartsbigdreams.org IBBY Ethiopia and Open Hearts Big Dreams Announce Exciting New International Developments March 2024 – The Ethiopian Section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY Ethiopia) and Open […]

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A New Library, A New Language for OHBD-RSG Books, More Big Dreams!

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

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Celebrating Jane Kurtz IBBY Reading Promoter Award and her volunteer efforts with OHBD – Blog Post Three the Creative Process for OHBD Ready Set Go Books Project

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

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Celebrating Jane Kurtz IBBY Reading Promoter Award and her volunteer efforts with OHBD – Blog Post Two WHY OHBD Ready Set Go Books Project Started

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

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A Book’s Tale

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.

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OHBD Language Preservation – Dizin Children’s Books for Maji Ethiopia: “an amazing treasure”

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

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Creating OHBD RSG Books to Enhance Reading Comprehension Skills

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

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Preserving a Rare Ethiopian Language for the Anuak People of Gambella

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

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Open Hearts Big Dreams – Five Years into the Organizational Journey

In 2016, I started the process of taking Open Hearts Big Dreams from the fundraising event we started in 2011 to a full-fledged not-for-profit. I was inspired by our amazing daughter and the opportunities we saw to contribute after funding and expanding a library in her birth-town of Bahir Dar (pictured here). That year was

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