Baseball Bats for Christmas — Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak

Life in the high Arctic is beautifully captured in this classic picture book, read aloud in digital form by award-winning Inuit author Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak. The year is 1955 and Arvaarluk and his friends watch as Rocky Parsons lands his plane on the ice in Repulse Bay, a tiny community “smack dab on the Arctic Circle.”  Having never seen trees before, the children try to guess what the six green spindly things are that Rocky delivers. One of the boys has a brilliant idea: why not use them as baseball bats?  Full of vibrant, richly-colored illustrations, this story gives young readers ages 5 to 8 a glimpse into a time, place, and culture that may be new to them.  The Arctic way of life is realistically portrayed by the author, whose narrative voice resonates with the lilt of his native language, Inuktitut