Best Children's Canada Books

After breaking or tying more than sixty records in hockey, it's no wonder that Wayne Gretzky is known as "The Great One." Maurice “The Rocket” Richard, of the Montreal Canadiens, was the first National Hockey League player to do it, in the 1944–1945 season. Finally New York Islander Mike Bossy tied the record thirty-six years later. One season later, Wayne Gretzky, just twenty years old, skated onto the ice. On this gusty winter day, Wayne felt lucky. By the end of the second period, he scored again for a hat trick: three goals altogether. Five minutes into the third period, Wayne slid the puck around a rushing defender. Philadelphia left their net wide open. Grant Fuhr, the Oilers’ goalie, pushed the puck to right wing Glenn Anderson. “Pass it to me!” Wayne shouted from the Flyers’ zone. Wayne Gretzky didn’t just break the record. And by the end of the season, Wayne scored ninety-two goals in eighty games for another record. Wayne would go on to break or tie more than sixty records. (In hockey, players earn a point for each goal or assist.). Wayne wasn’t the biggest or fastest or strongest. Wayne Douglas Gretzky was a different kind of hockey player, almost from the time he could walk. Chapter 1: Growing Up Gretzky In Canada, hockey is THE sport. When Canadian children dream of being a pro athlete, most don’t think of baseball or football. Wayne was born on January 26, 1961, in Brantford, a small city in the province of Ontario, Canada. Just skated.” And that’s where it all began—on the river running right past the Gretzky family farm. It’s where Alexander Graham Bell worked on his landmark invention. It hit Walter on the head, cracking his helmet. After Wayne, Walter and Phyllis had four more children: Kim, Keith, Brent, and Glen. On weekends, they’d all troop out to the family farm to visit their grandparents. Every Sunday after church, Grandma Gretzky made a huge dinner. So she served traditional Polish food like pierogi, a kind of dumpling. And every Saturday night, from the time Wayne was little, the family gathered around the TV. They watched a show called Hockey Night in Canada . Using a tiny hockey stick, he’d shoot a rubber ball or rolled-up sock between Grandma’s legs. Poor Walter waited for hours in the freezing cold. Now Walter could sit in his warm kitchen and watch Wayne out the window. The family called it “Wally Coliseum.”. Wayne wanted to learn everything about playing hockey. So his parents tried to sign him up for the Brantford Atom league team.

A young boy wakes up to the sound of the sea, visits his grandfather's grave after lunch and comes home to a simple family dinner, but all the while his mind strays to his father digging for coal deep down under the sea. Her first picture book, Our Corner Grocery Store , illustrated by Laura Beingessner, was nominated for the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award. Since graduating from NSCAD University, he has illustrated multiple children’s books, including the highly acclaimed wordless picture book Sidewalk Flowers , conceived by Jon Arno Lawson, which won a Governor General’s Award and was shortlisted for the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal.

Lyrically and lovingly written, this visually stunning book is infused with the Inuit values of love and respect for the land and its animal inhabitants. PreS—Just when you thought your library didn't need another picture book about parental love, Kalluk and Neonakis have created this far North fantasy that combines awe and coziness in equal measure.

As she asks her grandmother about these things, she is told about life in a residential school a long time ago, where everything was taken away. "…Robertson handles a delicate task here admirably well: explaining residential schools, that shameful legacy, and making them understandable to small children. Flett’s gorgeous, skillful illustrations have a flattened, faux naïve feel to them, like construction paper collage, a style that works perfectly with the story. She nicely contrasts the school’s dull browns and grays with the riotous colors surrounding Nókom and gets much expression from her simple silhouettes. Flett's spring palette of warm blues and browns punctuated with splashes of red contrasts the loving moments between grandmother and granddaughter with stark winter whites and grays depicting boarding school life. The repetitive structure creates a predictable narrative; together the illustrations and Robertson's child-centred text make the boarding school experience accessible to a young audience without glossing over its harshness. A beautifully rendered story of resisitance and love, this is made all the more luminous by Flett's art - not just by flashes of fuschsia or scarlet among ochre grasses, but by her precisely observed images of the compact bodies of the uniformed children, bowed beneath the weight of the scissors, or lovingly tending each other's hair. "Done simply, but with devastating clearness this is the story of a woman telling her granddaughter of her time in one of the boarding schools to which Canadian First Nation children were taken.

Master storyteller Christopher Paul Curtis's Newbery Honor novel, featuring his trademark humor, unique narrative voice, and new cover art--now in paperback! The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 won a Newbery Honor and a Coretta Scott King Honor book citation in 1996.

On December 6, 1917, two ships collided in Halifax Harbor in Nova Scotia, Canada. “Disasters make for gripping reading, and this account of the huge explosion of a munitions ship and its devastating effects in Halifax Harbor, Canada, in 1917 tells the dramatic history with clear detailed facts.” ― Booklist.

Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-. chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo! In this folktale, help is slow in coming when a Chinese boy falls into a well, since the boy's long and difficult name must be pronounced in full.

Enduring every hardship from loneliness to attack by armed rebels to contact with killer lions and crocodiles, Salva is a survivor, and his story goes on to intersect with Nya’s in an astonishing and moving way. *Starred Review* After 11-year-old Salva’s school in Sudan is attacked by brutal rebel soldiers in 1985, he describes several terrifying years on the run in visceral detail: “The rain, the mad current, the bullets, the crocodiles, the welter of arms and legs, the screams, the blood.” Finally, he makes it to refugee camps in Ethiopia and then Kenya, where he is one of 3,000 young men chosen to go to America. In chapters that alternate with Salva’s story, Nya, a young Sudanese girl in 2008, talks about daily life, in which she walks eight hours to fetch water for her family.

This New York Times bestselling Nordic tale in the tradition of The Snowman, The Polar Express, and the many books of Jan Brett will have readers of all ages believing in the magic of Christmas. The full-page photographs look like they could be movie stills, so sharp and seamless are the figures that Anja and the animals cut against the winter landscape of Northern lights, glaciers, and snowy pine trees.

Frida Kahlo and Her Animalitos , written by Monica Brown and illustrated by John Parra, is based on the life of one of the world's most influential painters, Frida Kahlo, and the animals that inspired her art and life. Featuring charming visuals and lively, often lyrical prose, this picture book introduces Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, interweaving biographical details while highlighting her special relationships with pets...Rich-hued, folk art–style illustrations incorporate evocative touches, fanciful details, and collagelike compositions. With their folk-art sensibility, Parra’s elegant acrylic paintings evoke Kahlo’s style, her palette and her Mexican environment, but he creates a mood of harmony with the natural world and a lively, cheerful abundance all his own.

What he didn’t expect was to meet a stray dog, with a big goofy head and little legs—a dog all on his own, filthy and covered in bugs, in a bomb-ridden district, but who carried himself with confidence. When not travelling with Fred, he works intensively with veteran organizations, including the USA Warriors Ice Hockey Program and the Tragedy Assistance Programs for Survivors (TAPS).

Tacky's perfect friends find him annoying until his odd behavior saves the day. Mun singer cheerfully captures the mood of the tale with her whimsical, full-color illustrations that are particularly strong in depicting the hunters' deter mined, then befuddled, expressions and Tacky's madcap antics.

America’s #1 radio talk-show host and multi-million-copy #1 New York Times bestselling author presents a book for young readers with a history teacher who travels back in time to have adventures with exceptional Americans. Talk about a rock star—this guy wanted to protect young America so badly, he rode through those bumpy, cobblestone-y streets shouting “the British are coming!” On a horse. But what if you could get the real picture—by actually going back in time and seeing with your own eyes how our great country came to be? Our exceptional nation is waiting to be discovered all over again by exceptional young patriots— like you ! After offering a wide-ranging definition of American exceptionalism that begins with the statement that the U.S. is a “land built on true freedom and individual liberty, and it defends both around the world,” Limbaugh goes on to explain that the Founders believed all people were born to be “free as individuals.” Really? The book’s premise is that a substitute history teacher, Rush Revere, who dresses like his hero, Paul, along with his talking horse, Liberty, can go back in time. The text is wordy, and many of the pages are spent on the banter between Rush and Liberty, occasionally amusing but mostly just filling space, as do the tedious explanations of the way time travel works. They hadn’t been spoiled by wall-to-wall carpets, central heating and microwave ovens.” The fact that many modern-day people do experience incredible hardships, albeit different from the Pilgrims, seems not to have occurred to Limbaugh. Apparently, the turnaround for the struggling colony came “when every family was assigned its own plot of land to work.” Rush Revere drives home the point that it was after the Pilgrims stopped sharing the profits that success was ensured.

In the ancient South Pacific world of Oceania, Moana, a born navigator, sets sail in search of a fabled island.

Hang around just like a sloth and get to know the delightful residents of the Avarios Sloth Sanctuary in Costa Rica, the world’s largest sloth orphanage. Cooke, photographer, zoologist, and founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society, introduces a rehabilitation sanctuary in “a sleepy corner of Costa Rica,” home to approximately 150 slow-moving residents. Judy Arroyo is “mom” to each of these creatures, from Buttercup, the first tiny orphan that landed on her doorstep, to Sunshine and Sammy, rescued from poachers.