Name: Soda Bottle School, The
Availability: InStock

Center for Children’s Books Choice RIF Multicultural Collection

Living Now Silver Award in Green Living

Skipping Stones Honor Award

A Teaching for Change selection

In THE SODA BOTTLE SCHOOL, students, in a Guatemalan village, are squished into their tiny schoolhouse, two grades to a classroom. The villagers had tried expanding the school, but the money ran out before the project was finished. No money meant no materials, and that meant no more room for the students. Until one boy got a wonderful, crazy idea: Why not use soda bottles, which were readily available, to form the cores of the walls? Sometimes thinking outside the box—or inside the bottle—leads to the perfect solution.

Suzanne Slade is the award-winning author of more than one hundred nonfiction books for children. The incredible teamwork, creativity, and persistence of students in Guatemala who built their school out of trash inspired her to write Soda Bottle School, along with co-author Seño Laura Kutner, a teacher at that school. Some of Suzanne’s other recent titles include The House That George Built (a Junior Library Guild Selection, Bank Street College of Education Best Book of the Year) and Climbing Lincoln’s Steps (a Notable Social Studies TradeBook for Children, Paterson Prize for Books for Young People). Suzanne lives near Chicago with her husband and two children.

Laura Kutner is the real-life “Seño Laura” in The Soda Bottle School. She wrote this book because she wanted to “inspire young readers to believe in themselves and work together to make the world a better place, and have fun at the same time.”

Aileen Darragh also illustrated Give a Goat by Jan West Schrock for Tilbury. She provides volunteer graphic design services for her local library and the high school drama department. She lives in Sanford, Maine, with her husband, three daughters, and two rescue dogs.