Eden Park School Library: Voting

Kids shouldn't have to wait until they're old enough to vote to get caught up in the excitement of presidential elections! From the first primaries, through the party conventions, to the final count at the polls, the race for the presidency is a whirlwind of passionate speeches, sensational campaigns and new beginnings that every American can be a part of!

"I could do that,"says six-year-old Esther as she watches her mother making tea. Start her own business at the age of nineteen? Why, she could do that, too. But one thing Esther and other women could NOT do was vote. Only men could do that. With lively text and humorous illustrations as full of spirit as Esther herself, this striking picture book biography shows how one girl's gumption propels her through a life filled with challenges until, in 1869, she wins the vote for women in Wyoming Territory – the first time ever in the United States! I Could Do That! is a 2006 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

"An elderly African American woman, en route to vote, remembers her family's tumultuous voting history in this picture book publishing in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. a As Lillian, a one-hundred-year-old African American woman, makes a long haul up a steep hill to her polling place, she sees more than trees and sky she sees her family's history. She sees the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and her great-grandfather voting for the first time. She sees her parents trying to register to vote. And she sees herself marching in a protest from Selma to Montgomery. Veteran bestselling picture-book author Jonah Winter and Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award winner Shane W. Evans vividly recall America's battle for civil rights in this lyrical, poignant account of one woman's fierce determination to make it up the hill and make her voice heard."