#IMWAYR – Sept 19, 2016

It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? is hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date, and adapted by Kellee at Unleashing Readers and Jen at Teach Mentor Texts with a children’s/YA focus. The Sunday Post is hosted by The Caffeinated Book Reviewer. These weekly roundups are a great way to discover new blogs and bloggers, share titles, and add to your ever-growing to-read list.

It’s mid-September? It’s mid-September!! Halloween candies are in the shops! How is this possible?!?! Slow down, 2016, slow down!!!

OK, here’s what I’ve been up to this week:

Singable picture books! If you’ve got a kids’ program or story time coming up, you absolutely cannot go wrong with a singable picture book. Bounce, sing, dance and groove along with some of my all-time favourite singable picture books, and bring your next program to life.

Working with tweens/teens in a library, youth group or other social setting often involves crafts. This week for Nonfiction Wednesday I looked at Lazy Crafternoon, which has 50+ easy, affordable crafts that will appeal to the crafters in your school or library. Sometimes you just have to put the smartphone down and get your hands busy making something you can show off to your friends and family!

Have you heard of Canlit for LittleCanadians? I celebrated this fantastic free resource this week on the blog, and really encourage everyone to visit, bookmark and enjoy! Canadian children’s books tend to be overshadowed by the countless American imports that crowd our shelves, and it’s wonderful that Helen take the time to showcase all the wonderful Canadian titles that are available in libraries and bookstores across the country. Explore and share the love!

I am absolutely in love with the Poetry Friday community, and this week I shared another one of my childhood favourites, Dennis Lee’s classic Alligator Pie. Such a wonderfully zany poem, and Canadian, to boot!

Saturday was all about the #diversekidslit, with another round up of some of the best and brightest diverse kids book blog posts on the interwebs.

In other reading news, I’ve managed to get my hands on a few older editions of one of my all-time favourite cooking magazines, and I love it so very much that I just had to sing about it here on the blog: Yummy Magazine!! If you’ve never seen Yummy before, you NEED to find it somewhere – my local library has a subscription, and I couldn’t be happier. This English-language Filipino cooking magazine is AMAZING. The foodstyling and photography is just stunning, and it’s packed to the brim with the most delicious recipes, together with really interesting articles. I honestly knew next to nothing about Filipino cuisine or culture before picking up this magazine on a whim for the first time, and I’ve been both enlightened and inspired. Food is such an important window to any culture, and Yummy celebrates both traditional Filipino cuisine as well as international foods and fusion dishes. It introduces non-Filipinos to a really diverse, modern, vibrant culture that’s more than just one of the world’s largest producers of foreign workers.

I happen to come from a country that doesn’t really have a “cuisine” – sure there are a few dishes that people think of as Canadian, but then tend to be French-Canadian, and I can’t really relate to poutine on a personal level. It’s fascinating to me to explore a culture that has a long, vibrant food history, one that’s deeply rooted in the past, but is still changing with the times and moving forward into the future.

Anyway, this is a long ramble about a magazine, but what can I say, I love it!!

Have a great week, everybody!