Chelsea's Chinese New Year

by Lisa Bullard, Katie Saunders (Illustrator)

Overview

Chelsea's family is celebrating Chinese New Year! Chelsea gets to stay up late. She watches fireworks and a parade with a dragon! She and her family have a big feast. Find out the different ways people celebrate this special day!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761385790
Publisher:	Lerner Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/01/2012
Pages:	24
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.20(d)
Lexile:	490L (what's this?)
Age Range:	6 - 8 Years

About the Author

Lisa Bullard is the award-winning author of more than 60 books for children, including You Can Write a Story: A Story-Writing Recipe for Kids. She teaches writing classes at the Loft Literary Center and regularly visits schools to talk with students about story-writing.

Katie Saunders graduated in 2001 from the university of Central Lancashire in Preston, England, with a degree in Illustration. Over the years, Katie has worked for many publishers creating children's books. She has also written and designed her own baby books. Katie works with many greetings card companies and has also worked on toy designs. Mostly, Katie works with hand-drawn pen, collage, and computer-aided design, although over the years she has worked in all mediums.

Katie lives in her hometown of Kent with her partner, Graham, her three-year-old son, Archie, and her little girl, Olive Honey. They also have two cats named Dizzy and Pumpkin. Katie works in a little studio at the bottom of her garden, which her father built for her. She has never been happier.

Editorial Reviews

"Children from different cultural groups describe their families' celebrations. Information about the occasions is included in the simplistic stories, but text boxes provide more details than the young narrators do. Bright, cheerful illustrations will draw readers to these introductions. Birthday focuses on U.S. customs but mentions other traditions. An activity concludes each volume."

From the Publisher

On each page, Chelsea gives one to three sentence explanations of the parades, gifts, and food that are traditional for Chinese New Year, and small sidebars on each double-page spread offer facts about the history of the holiday. The twenty four page book is divided into four chapters. A child could read Chelsea's part, but an adult may need to read the sidebars as some of the words might be too difficult for the young reader, i.e. neighbors and ancestors. With little action or narrative, it is doubtful the book would lend itself to repeat readings. There is a missed opportunity to provide an explanation of the meaning of "Lunar New Year" which is mentioned as an alternate name for the holiday. The illustrations are very simplistic, and on the pages that mention food, the only identifiable dishes are oranges and fish. A cat peeks out on nearly every page if the reader wants to make a game of spotting it. An activity at the end asks the reader to find their birthday and the corresponding animal (monkey, pig, rat, etc.) symbol given for years 2004 to 2016, since the first day of each year may fall anywhere between Jan. 22 to Feb. 19. But there is no mention of the qualities each animal symbolizes, which could have sparked some discussion. The final pages include an eight item glossary, a listing of three books and three websites "to learn more," and a nine item index on the same page. Reviewer: Suzanne Tobin

Children's Literature - Suzanne Tobin