 Hi everyone, my name is Steph, this is Little Bookish Teacher and welcome or welcome back to my channel. Today is World Refugee Day and I am going to be sharing some picked books, five of them in fact, and two middle grade novels that deal with refugees or displaced persons. And these books would be a really great conversation starter in your classrooms with students around refugees, around compassion, and they're just really gorgeous beautiful books. The first book is an oldie but a goodie and that is Refugees by David Miller. First up I just have to say that this is one of those really beautiful collage books where all the illustrations look 3D. It's just a really stunning book visually but this is the story of two wild ducks who are displaced from their home, the swamp, when it is drained and they need to go in search of a new place to live and as they are trying to find a new place to live they find themselves in danger. There's a lot of violence and they are quite often rejected and so it is about how they cope with that and how they eventually find a new home. Obviously we can draw a lot of parallels to the experiences of people who need to escape their home because their lives are in danger and they come to a place where people don't understand them and don't understand their cultures because everything is different and this can be a really nice gentle way to open up conversation with kids around that. This is a really great starting point and a really great book to use for comparison with other stories as well. Another one which I don't have here with me, I think it's at school, is Room on a Rock by Kate and Joel Temple. This is a really unique picture book in that it can be told front to back and back to front and each time you read it it tells a different story. So this is about two seals who are huddling on a rock but the other seals around them are telling them that they're not welcome here, there's no more room on this rock and that they can't stay here. They don't accept them and they don't let them stay and so this sends these two seals into a dangerous situation. You read the book through the first time as you would a regular book and then when you get to the back of the book it points out that every story has two sides and it invites you as the reader to read the book back to front and as you read the book back to front the story is very very different. It is very cleverly written in that way because the words as you read them in one direction make you feel a really certain way. The first time I read this book I was absolutely gutted and devastated by the end by the time I got to the last page and so when you read it back to front I actually got really teary the first time because in reverse the message is just beautiful and there was one year where as a whole school we actually read the book from Foundation to Year 6 and we were using it for a reading response where we responded to the book at the end of the first reading and then when the kids got to experience the book in the other direction they then had to compare how their feelings had changed on the book and it is just very very powerful. It is very much about sharing and compassion but you can absolutely draw parallels with the experiences of refugees and displaced persons around the world who all want to hear that they are accepted and they are welcome but sometimes they don't hear that and unpacking that feeling with kids can be really powerful. Another one I'm kind of annoyed that I think is still at school because I love to share this book is Suri's Wall by Lucia Stella. This is just another gorgeous but also heartbreaking story. Suri and a group of children live high up on a mountain behind a wall and their village is down below but they are living here and they have one guard and they don't really know what is beyond the wall. They've never really lived anywhere else and Suri is a bit of an outcast within the group of kids. She's a little bit taller a little bit different and she has this incredible imagination and as she gets older and she gets taller suddenly she can see beyond the top of the wall while the other kids still can't and so they become curious and they start to ask her what she sees. Using her imagination she tells them these beautiful tales and it gives these kids so much hope and then of course the heartbreaking thing is by the end of the book what we know is that Suri is trying to give everyone hope because the sounds that are coming from beyond the wall are the sounds of violence and fighting and it's just a really powerful book and there are so many great conversations that you can have about it about why wouldn't she tell the truth to the to the younger kids and how powerful is the power of hope. So again a very poignant very powerful book. There is My Two Blankets by Irina Cobbold and illustrated by Freya Blackwood. This gorgeous book is about Cartwheel who has to leave her home with her aunt and they find themselves in a strange place where they have to learn a new language and they have to learn how to live in a new place and they have to everything is new and everything is confronting and all that Cartwheel has of her old life is her aunt and this blanket that she's brought with her but as she slowly begins to make a friend and as she slowly begins to learn the language and she begins to become accustomed to where she is now she crafts this new blanket that's the My Two Blankets and it is a beautiful story of hope and persistence and courage and remembering that no matter where you are you are still you you are ballot and you are important. It's absolutely gorgeous and the thing that I love about this book so this one is just told in English but there are two other versions of this book one that is told in English and Dari and one that is told in Arabic and English and the fact that there are multiple copies of the same book available in different languages I love that and I wish we saw more of it and then my final picture book is another very well known picture book and this one is The Arrival by Sean Tan and while this one is not specifically about refugees it could be about immigrants, it could be about refugees, it could be about displaced persons, it is about coming to a new place and feeling like everything around you is alien and weird and totally foreign and you have to figure out how and where you fit into this place. This is a wordless picture book the illustrations in here are incredible and in many places it's almost told in kind of like a graphic novel style but really it's more about moments. It is just one of the most amazing picture books and there is so much to unpack in here and if you haven't seen it I highly recommend you check it out. All of Sean Tan's works are amazing but this one is just incredible for the journey that you are taken on as we follow our character who is in a new place and it's strange and uncomfortable and foreign it's a gorgeous book. It's really great for visual literacy for unpacking this with older readers and for highlighting the fact that sometimes you don't need words to tell a story sometimes the visual is enough and then I have two middle grade recommendations. The first is The Year the Maps Changed by Danielle Binks. This is a story that is set in 1999 here in Victoria in a place called Sorrento. It is the story of Fred who lives with her adoptive father and her pop. Her mother passed away when she was quite young and so she's lived her whole life with these two men and suddenly everything is changing because Luca her her adoptive father has a new girlfriend and she has a son and they are suddenly bringing these two families together and she is not quite sure how to deal with this. Alongside that the world sort of the world at large is reeling from the Kosovo war and she's learning about it at school particularly because a group of Kosova Albanian refugees are being housed at a government facility not far from where she lives in Sorrento and suddenly this becomes personal for her and for members of her community. It is just a really poignant really beautifully written middle grade novel that looks at the impact of war the way that international governments deal with refugees how we as a community can have the opportunity to make things better for people for demonstrating compassion and care. It's just it's a gorgeous book and then another one is The Bone Sparrow by Zana Freiland which I actually haven't read for years I probably need to go back to it because it was just one of those books that I walked away from and I just had so many big feelings about it. It is the story of Sabai who is a 10 year old boy who has lived his entire life in a detention centre. We get to meet his family, we get to meet his friends, we get to meet other members of his community who are living in the detention centre but he makes a connection with a girl who lives beyond the fence. They have this connection through a book that belonged to this girl's mother and it is a beautiful story of bravery, of friendship, of hope, in the face of adversity and there are so many things that go on in this story but they're all told from the perspective of this 10 year old who doesn't always understand everything but does see and hear a lot and so this is one definitely to read and to be aware of the content of it and how it might impact the readers in your school but it's just a gorgeous story. I will leave links to all of these books down below if you're interested in checking them out or finding out more information about them. In the comments I would love to know if you have any book recommendations for World Refugee Day. If you want to let me know that you're here but you don't want to leave a comment feel free to leave a seal emoji down below otherwise I hope that wherever you are in the world you're staying safe and healthy and I will see you in my next video. Thanks so much for watching, bye everyone.