15 Minutes of Fun for Family Literacy Day!

January 27, 2014 is the 16th annual Family Literacy Day. ABC Life Literacy Canada is "encouraging families to take time each day to have ’15 Minutes of Fun’." They even have a list of ideas of great activities you can do with your family that will encourage fun while learning and to help develop a life-long love of reading. Since our member publishers have a great selection of Canadian books for children, young readers, and teens we’d thought we’d put together our own list of books to read, along with some complementary activies.

Happy reading!

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A story of the struggle of Black Loyalists and their arrival in Nova Scotia.

Chasing Freedom (Roseway Publishing, Ages 12+)

Sarah and her grandmother are all that is left of her family when the American Revolutionary war comes to a close. Loyalist slaves working on a South Carolina plantation, they are rounded up with the thousands of other freed slaves waiting to be sent to a new home somewhere in the British colonies. With their Certificates of Freedom, Sarah and her grandmother are sent to Birchtown, Nova Scotia where they hope to begin a new life of acceptance and happiness.

If This Is Freedom (Roseway Publishing, Ages 12+)

A companion novel to Chasing Freedom, If This Is Freedom sees Sarah working for a new family, having signed an indentured agreement. The contract is supposed to ensure Sarah a living wage but the family does not honour the agreement. In the midst of this desperate situation, Sarah makes a wrong step that sets off an unusual chain of events.

Learn about the free Black Loyalist settlement of Birchtown, Nova Scotia. Founded 1783, it was the largest free settlement of Africans in North America in the 18th century.

Possible resources: www.blackloyalist.com; ansa.novascotia.ca/birchtown; www.cbc.ca

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The Dead Kid Detective Agency & Dial “M” for Morna (ECW Press, Ages 8+)

Thirteen-year-old October Schwartz is new in town, short on friends, and the child of a clinically depressed science teacher. Naturally, she spends most of her time in the Sticksville Cemetery, which just happens to border her backyard. And that backyard just happens to be the home of five dead teenagers, each from a different era of the past: there’s the dead United Empire Loyalist! The dead escaped slave who made her way north via the Underground Railroad! The dead quintuplet!

Soon, October befriends the five dead kids. Together — using October’s smarts and the dead kids’ abilities to walk through walls and get around undetected and stuff — they form The Dead Kid Detective Agency, committed to solving Sticksville’s most mysterious mysteries. October’s like Nancy Drew, if she’d hung out with corpses.

Evan Munday is the very talented author and illustrator behind the Dead Kid Detective Agency series. His fun drawings are scattered throughout both books. Try your hand at drawing some of October’s ghostly friends!

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Pirate Gran Goes for Gold (Breakwater Books, Ages 3+)

Gran’s back. And this time she is going for Gold!

In her second book, Pirate Gran’s got wind of the Olympics—and in her latest adventure with old shipmate Fingers O’Malley, her long-suffering croc and the rest of the crew, she’s dead-set on becoming World Champion Gran… FEISTIER, SPRYER, WRONG-ER – whatever it takes, Gran is going to finish first.

(You can check out Gran in her original adventure here.)

Play a game with your family and see who comes out on top! Alternatively, you can learn all about Team Canada for the upcoming Sochi Games here.

_______Edited from the original post, published on the LPG blog