China Text Set

During my last year as a librarian working in the middle school., I started to think about refurbishing the China section of the library. Many school libraries have books that are 15-20 years old. That really is a shame when China is growing and modernizing at a rapid pace. The next thing I knew, the economy went into a tail spin and my budget for books was frozen. This assignment is my chance to put together a text set that teachers at the middle school would love to have. It seems like fate, that the high school has been chosen as a Confucius Classroom and will be able to offer classes in Mandarin. I hope that when the economy recovers, I can once again work in the library and make this China unit a reality.
The first part of my text set is a list of books that are very readable (below 6.5 reading level) from the shelves of the library. Here are four examples:
1. Napoli, Donna Jo, 1948-. Bound. In a novel based on Chinese Cinderella tales, fourteen-year-old stepchild Xing-Xing endures a life of neglect and servitude, as her stepmother cruelly mutilates her own child's feet so that she alone might marry well.
2. O'Connor, Jane. The emperor's silent army : terracotta warriors of Ancient China. Describes the archaeological discovery of thousands of life-sized terracotta warrior statues in northern China in 1974, and discusses the emperor who had them created and placed near his tomb.
3. Borja, Robert. Making Chinese papercuts. Highlights the origins and uses of Chinese paper cutting and presents instructions for many projects, including decorations, greeting cards, and puppets.
4. Young, Ed. Night visitors. Retelling of a Chinese folktale in which a young scholar learns respect for all forms of life when he becomes part of an ant colony in a dream.

The next part is the books I would like to purchase. There is a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction which includes picture books, biographies, ancient and modern history books, culture, and stories. I even found a graphic novel I liked. All of these books are published after 2005 and are for grades 5-9. (I emailed the list to Dr. Dauer. If you would like to see it let me know.)

For websites that are fun, I choose one that generates a Chinese name using your English name and another from PBS Nova about mummies. Also, because I attended a seminar on the Chinese garden in Portland, here is the website with beautiful pictures and Chinese poetry.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/chinamum/

http://www.mandarintools.com/chinesename.html

http://www.portlandchinesegarden.org/

I would use Cobblestone and Faces magazines as resources because both are terrific for reluctant readers as well as the entire class. The website for magazines/news/encyclopedias that I always promote to students is OSLIS
http://secondary.educator.oslis.org/find-information