Celebrate diversity in the classroom with fabulous stories! Including multilingual literacy is a culturally sustaining approach that can make all students feel included and valued. Storybooks Canada is a free open educational digital resource that supports multi-literacy and multilingual learning in homes, schools, and communities. Part of the Global Storybooks project, it aims to promote bilingualism and multilingualism in Canada by making 40 stories from the African Storybook available with text and audio in the major immigrant and refugee languages of Canada as well as First Nations languages! Through their continuous development of the literacy portals: Indigenous Storybooks and Global Storybooks, more translations are starting to come up. In the video below learn how to navigate the Storybooks Canada website. Please share and enjoy!
All 40 stories on the Storybooks Canada website come from the African Storybook, a groundbreaking digital initiative of the South African organization Saide, which promotes literacy for African children. The African Storybook has over 700 stories in multiple African languages, with translations to more mainstream languages. The stories are openly licensed, which allowed Storybooks Canada to repurpose them for a Canadian audience. A story that would normally be read in English or French at school can be read in the mother tongue by parents and children at home. Global Storybooks is a free multilingual literacy resource for children and youth worldwide. Read, download, toggle, and listen to a wide variety of illustrated stories from the African Storybook and other open sites. In this way, Global Storybooks encourages children to maintain their mother tongue in both oral and print form. Development continues at the University of British Columbia.
Storybooks Canada selected the 40 stories out of several hundred from the African Storybook and sought to create a collection of stories of different lengths that balance the African origin of the stories with internationally relevant themes. There are traditional animal fables as well as contemporary stories about city life. Some stories cover serious topics like responsibility and gender equality. Others are just written to make you laugh. The universal values reflected in the stories will resonate with children across Canada and align with the BC Curriculum. The audio versions of the stories can help beginning readers and language learners make the important connection between speech and text. While Storybooks Canada focuses on immigrant and refugee languages mostly, they acknowledge and try to support the many Indigenous languages of Canada with the website Indigenous Storybooks.
Indigenous Storybooks is a Canadian website for children, families, community members, and educators. The project aims to make the text, images, and audio of stories available in Indigenous languages, so stories that are usually read in English or French at school can be read in ancestral languages. This new digital resource was inspired by the open-licensed stories from Little Cree Books, a project in Alberta, Canada with a groundbreaking digital initiative promoting literacy in Cree language. The stories are openly licensed, which allows the Indigenous Storybooks team to repurpose and translate them into other languages together with a modern, responsive web design for reading the stories. Indigenous Storybooks is still under development and will continue to add languages, stories, and resources as they become available. In the video below Dr. Sara Davidson introduces Indigenous Storybooks. There are also several websites that offer Indigenous digital stories. Check them out!
- Little Cree Books contains books in Cree
- First Voices has over 60 communities documenting a wide variety of Indigenous languages
- Legends Project documents First Nations and Inuit stories from coast to coast.
- South Slave Divisional Education Council has stories and other resources in Chipewyan, Cree, and Slavey.
Another incredible website that features exclusive titles from Indigenous authors is Eaglespeaker Publishing. Jason Eaglespeaker, Founder/Owner of Eaglespeaker Publishing, has developed a selection of authentically Indigenous graphic novels, memoirs, novels, language books, children’s books, colouring books and more – by him and a growing group of powerful new authors, from throughout Turtle Island and beyond. “NAPI & The Rock” is a beautiful free book by Jason Eaglespeaker that is available on the website. Blackfoot people have been using NAPI as an educational/motivational tool for thousands of years. Countless generations have survived, and thrived, from the priceless knowledge that NAPI introduces. “NAPI & The Rock” is available in two versions, Level 2 Reader: Full of Simple Sentences, Sight words and words to sound out, and Level 3 Reader: A high-interest story with new vocabulary and longer sentences, each with their own unique art style and reading level. This authentically Indigenous story is part of an ongoing children’s book series. NAPI is a trickster … a trouble maker … a foolish being … he teaches us what not to do.
