Capture the memories of a child’s adoption with My Adoption Celebration Journal! Filled with pages for recording this special time, it will remain a vital part of your family for years to come!

A Special Scrapbook for Adopted Children. What a great place to store favorite photos, stories and awards. This valuable collection can be passed on to children and grandchildren and thus preserve your family heritage. This project will give you many moments of pleasant memories later in life as well as acquaint future generations with your current family.

From the Back Cover: Families are many different things. Some children live with divorced or lone parents, other are adopted, live in care or even become young carers.

In this book eight young people talk about their family situations. Fact panels provide further information on the issues. The book includes details of organisations that can be contacted by young people who are experiencing family problems themselves.

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Compiler’s Note: See, particularly, “Care and adoption”: James was put into care aged four after very difficult early years and his feelings are shut down. He was adopted at the age of eight and, with his adoptive parents, has learned how to feel and care. (pp. 22-25).

From the Back Cover: This beautiful baby book will make a lovely keepsake for all kinds of adoptive families. Inside you’ll find pages to record milestones, moments, firsts, favorites, and special areas to chart the adopted baby’s unique journey, as well as a sturdy pocket in which to store memorabilia. In addition, you’ll find over 60 stickers you can use to customize the family tree pages. As the pages of the journal fill with memories, My Family, My Journey will stand as a lasting testament of love for the entire family.

Makayla is visiting friends in her neighborhood. She sees how each family is different. Some families have lots of children, but others have none. Some friends live with grandparents or have two dads or have parents who are divorced. How is her own family like the others? What makes each one great? This diverse cast allows readers to compare and contrast families in multiple ways.

What a wonderful way for a child to record and remember the events before he or she was adopted or reunited with the birth family. There are fill-in-the-blank pages to record information about birth parents, foster care (with room for multiple placements), adoption or reunification memories, and, of course,“all about me.” Pages that are not relevant can easily be removed. In addition, this book contains a simple explanation of the whys and hows of foster care. Every child passing through placement deserves the gift of My Foster Care Journey. About the Author: Beth O’Malley spent her first five months in foster care before entering her family by adoption.“Adoption has been a driving force in my life,” says O’Malley. As an adoption social worker, Beth has made countless LifeBooks with children in foster care. LifeBooks are an essential tool for helping foster/adopted children connect with their past which frees them for future relationships. She lives by the ocean in Winthrop, MA, with her husband and dog, Jade.

My Foster Family is a special children’s coloring book that offers young children entering foster care the opportunity to explore their feelings and to adjust to the foster care system. Intended for young children who are being placed in foster care for the first time, it provides a gentle and thoughtful description of both the logistical and emotional changes that a young child is likely to face. Useful at any stage of the foster care placement process, My Foster Family employs the familiar coloring-book format as a safe and supportive tool to help children share their deepest fears and concerns upon entering foster care.

Capture delightful memories of your children’s life in My Holiday Memories Scrapbook for Adopted Kids. Decorate these treasured photographs; include clever sayings, memoirs, stickers, and awards. Your children will really enjoy helping you create this scrapbook. Affordable and convenient, this uniquely elegant memory book makes a wonderful gift for any child.

Capture delightful memories of your children’s life in My Holiday Memories Scrapbook for Adopted Kids. Decorate these treasured photographs; include clever sayings, memoirs, stickers, and awards. Your children will really enjoy helping you create this scrapbook. Affordable and convenient, this uniquely elegant memory book makes a wonderful gift for any child.

From the Publisher: For children separated from their birth families, life story work is one way of filling in the gaps about their lives and gives children a structured and understandable way of talking about themselves. My Life and Me provides a much-needed template to help children separated from their family of origin develop and record an accurate knowledge of their past and their family. Once completed, the book will provide them with a permanent record which they, and with their permission, the adults caring for them, can refer to at any time and which the child can carry with them through life. This durable and comprehensive workbook can be used flexibly by any child, including children with special needs and children adopted from abroad. Colour-coded sections include space for drawings, photographs, documents and a record of feelings and thoughts at various stages in the child’s life. My Life and Me starts with “A Photograph of Me.” It is then divided into the following sections: Things I know about myself; My health; My birth family; Contact with my birth parents; Special memories; My schools; My disability; The country where I was born. Separate practice guidelines will help social workers, foster carers, adoptive parents and others undertaking direct work with children to understand the background and significance of completing the various sections of the book.

Being a foster parent herself, Robbin put this memory book together to help Foster and soon-to-be-adopted children capture the memories of their lives. Features 100 developmentally appropriate pages, making it easy to record a child’s development, important information, and events. The book is simple to use for foster parents and has ample space to track growing up years, that otherwise may be lost, including room for photos. Also includes extra pages at the back to record “special events” that may occur while living in a given home.

From the Back Cover (2004): Living in foster care requires many changes over which children have no control. They must learn to quickly adjust to a different family, a new group of friends, a new set of rules, a new school, and sometimes even a community. Usually, these changes bring about a wide range of feelings. Feelings such as sadness, fear and anger can interfere with a child’s ability to feel happy and to cope with change.

The assignments are also designed to help children record their very special memories. This is important because sometimes during difficult times children unintentionally block out important memories which can help them make important decisions in the future.

Adjusting to life in foster care can be hard. We hope that this book will help make things a little easier.

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From the Back Cover (2008): Children placed in foster homes face many difficult changes over which they have no control. They must learn to quickly adjust to a different family, a new set of rules, and possibly a new school and community-almost an entirely new life. These changes can be overwhelming for kids, and the sadness, fear, and anger they may feel can prevent them from making a successful transition into foster care.

The simple activities in My Lifebook Journal offer children the tools they need to adjust to their new situation in a healthy way. Using the worksheets in this book, kids can journal about their positive experiences and memories, learn to develop a strong sense of self, identify the people they can rely on, and learn coping skills for dealing with feelings of anger and sadness. Writing down and exploring their thoughts and feelings in just a few minutes each day can help children better understand themselves and their biological and foster families. The resiliency and self-confidence that these activities develop will help children handle not only the transition into foster care, but also the many positive changes in their lives still to come. The professional edition includes both the Instant Help book and a companion CD that offers the complete book and printable worksheets for your clients.

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About the Author: Therese Accinelli, holds a Master’s Degree in clinical psychology and is a licensed marriage and family therapist. She has worked with children in foster care for nearly a decade. Ms. Accinelli grew up in Southern California, where she still resides with her husband, daughter, and cat. She is one of twelve children and has an identical twin sister.

Do you have both biological and adopted children in your life? If so, this book will be a great addition for your collection! My Parents Love Me Too! is intended for the biological child who may feel lost in the celebration of adoption. He/she must know that they are also special and loved. Stacie Cahill designed this book to help the child understand that they are just as important as their adopted siblings. Biological children will feel more secure with the addition of adopted siblings, after reading this unique new book! Jacob Cahill, the author´s son, is a curious nine-year-old who illustrated this book from the biological child´s perspective. He is a protective big brother and loves his adopted sisters, Chelsea and Brooklynn, with all of his heart! Jacob wants biological children everywhere to celebrate their own very special birth. By the Same Author: I Know Who I Am!, Who Am I?, and Victory in the Void.

From the Publisher: This book stresses the positive aspects to adoption—quite rightly. Here, birth parents are seen as having given something very special: life. And the adoptive parents have given a home and family and much-needed love. The book is also honest in the kinds of questions that adopted children can have: are they second best, why did their birth parents have them adopted, why don’t they know more about their birth parents? These are tackled within the possible parameters of knowledge and no easy answers are given. The warm, soft-coloured illustrations with lots of reassuring rounded curves, show us different kinds of families. There is a page of advice for parents, a list of further reading, and a list of agencies having to do with fostering and adoption. A good resource for starting in-depth discussion about adoption in families.

This decorative journal is the perfect companion to My Special Care Scrapbook for Adopted Children (Children’s Scrapbook Series Book 7). It’s a great tool for writing down your thoughts, favorite recipes, or simply keeping track of important reminders, personal notes, and special occasions. This journal is great for jotting down your own poetry and short stories, or use it to store addresses and phone numbers. Convenient to carry and beautiful to look at, My Special Care Journal for Adopted Children: A Daily Journal makes a thoughtful and unique gift!

Capture delightful memories of your children’s life with this special scrapbook. Decorate these pages with treasured photos; include awards, stickers, favorite stories and school memories. Your children will really enjoy helping create special memories.

My Special Someone is a beautiful full-color book written and illustrated by a six-year-old. Brittany tells how her family adopted a baby sister into their family and describes the process from a child’s point of view. Each book includes a bookmark with suggestions for bonding moments with your child. There is a section in the back of the book which provides some of the questions you can ask your child to discuss adoption as well as how the child feels about having a new sibling in the family.

Follows a girl as she is taken from her neglected home by the courts, put up for adoption, and placed with new parents who forbid her to search for her real family or maintain her own original identity.

From the Publisher: Thousands of readers enjoyed the original story! This revised edition combines the original children’s book with an eight-page guide for adults, including adoptive parents, birth parents, and the general public. Written by an adoptive parent, this true story lovingly connects birth mom and child while stressing the importance of the adoptive parents. “...Wherever you are Annie’s Child, she loved you before you were born. She loves you now. Never, never, never will she stop loving you.” Illustrations for the text are a combination of drawings by adopted children and photographs. Both text and illustrations are a chocolate colored ink on cream paper.

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About the Author: Jolene Durrant is an adoptive parent and a former elementary school teacher. Annie, the young woman in the story, was Durrant’s foster daughter during Annie’s pregnancy.

From the Publisher: Noelle Lamperti was five years old when she began identifying with things that were brown. Adopted into a white family in rural Vermont—America’s whitest state—it became an important part of her sense of identity that she find herself reflected in people and things that were brown.

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Compiler’s Note: Most sources list a copyright of 1979 for Noelle’s Brown Book; however, on the copyright page of Brown Like Me, it says that the book was “[o]riginally published under the title: Noelle’s Brown Book, New Victoria, 1976.”

Every child loves to hear the story of how he or she came into the world, but usually very little attention is paid to how the world was in that magical moment. For any family who feels a special connection to nature and the flow of life, On the Day You Were Born will help baby understand how each of us is received not just by our family, but by the universe and its gentle ways. The simple, bright pictures in Debra Frasier’s book recall Matisse, and they won the book a Parents’ Choice Award for illustration. In the final pages, each illustration and theme in the book (migrating animals, gravity, glowing moon, rising tide, etc.) is explained in simple and direct language that can be used to teach older children how nature works on our planet, and how Earth works in the universe.

Brought up in a Vietnamese orphanage and rescued from the invading North Vietnamese army, Tuyet has been adopted by a kind and loving family in Canada. But polio has left her with a weak leg, and her foot is turned inward, making walking painful and difficult. She must have a series of operations but dreads doctors and the hospital because they bring back troubling memories of helicopters, a field hospital and another operation in Vietnam. But now that she has been given a chance at a normal life, Tuyet is determined to do what it takes to finally stand on her own two feet. By the Same Author: Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s Rescue from War (2012).

From the Back Cover: Hey girls!

Got a minute or two?

That’s all it will take to learn a little more about God each day.

Fun stories about girls just like you—hanging with friends, living life—will help you discover who God wants you to be.

Each story is accompanied by some questions to make you think and a verse to stick in your memory.

Getting to know God was never this easy—or fun!

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Compiler’s Note: See, January 20, “Adopted by God”; March 1, “Family Members”; and June 9, “Part of the Family.”

From the Dust Jacket: Whether she’s shaking cream into butter, washing the clothes on laundry day, or carrying in the wood—Opal Whiteley’s days are filled with plenty of work to help her new mama. Opal tries not to mind too much, but with each chore she longs to do what she loves most: explore the world around her. In the quiet of the plants, animals, birds, and open air, Opal finds her friends and her peace.

And each afternoon Opal writes about her life, on any scrap of paper she can find. Here are her words, along with Barbara Cooney’s beautifully gentle paintings, to open the door to the heart of a young girl then and now....

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About the Author: Opal Whiteley must have been born about 1900. Adopted by an Oregon family, this curious child found herself uprooted nineteen times as her family moved from one lumber camp to another.

Jane Boulton, a poet herself, could see the poetry in Opal’s writing. The author of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart, a full adaptation of Opal’s diary, published by Tioga Publishers, she lives in Palo Alto, California.

Barbara Cooney is one of the most beloved illustrators of children’s books today. For The Ox-Cart Man and Chanticleer and the Fox she received the Caldecott Medal for illustration, and for her Miss Rumphius, The American Book Award. Many of her books, among them The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree by Gloria Houston and Emily by Michael Bedard, are considered modern classics. She lives in Damariscotta, Maine.

From the Publisher: What does a foster kid need to do to overcome his or her harsh beginning and make a successful transition into adulthood? Author Paul Knowlton answers this and other questions surrounding the foster care experience.

Knowlton and his siblings, first generation Cuban-Americans, entered the New Jersey foster care system in 1965. They remained in foster care for various lengths of time until they met again ten years later. But their reunion was short-lived.

In the years that followed, the siblings scattered and struggled, but, as they grew into adults, they bonded and prospered. Now, after twenty years of gathering information, Knowlton presents The Original Foster Care Survival Guide, which will give foster children and former foster children the critical guidance they need to overcome their experience and prosper in their new lives. With access to this unique combination of wisdom and knowledge, no foster child—present or former—will ever wonder, “What do I need to do to get out of this mess?”

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About the Author: Former foster child Paul Enrique Knowlton is a successful patent attorney who lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

From the Publisher: Between 1854 and 1930, more than 200,000 orphaned or abandoned children were sent west on orphan trains to find new homes. Some were adopted by loving families; others were not as fortunate. In recent years, some of the riders have begun to share their stories. Andrea Warren alternates chapters about the history of the orphan trains with the story of Lee Nailling, who in 1926 rode an orphan train to Texas when he was nine years old.

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About the Author: Andrea Warren’s books about children are the result of her passion for history and her interest in young readers. She has been a professional writer for twenty years and works from her home office in the Kansas City area. Her first book for Houghton Mifflin, Orphan Train Rider, won the 1996 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for nonfiction.

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By the Same Author: Searching for Love (1987, Bantam Books); We Rode the Orphan Trains (2001); and Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy (2004, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), among many others.

Learn about the homeless city children who were taken out West to have new homes in the early 1900s. Contents: An orphan’s story; Poor working-class families; New York’s homeless children; How the orphan trains began; Who rode the orphan trains?; Finding homes for orphans; The baby trains; The end of the orphan trains.

From the Back Cover: From 1854 to 1929, the Children’s Aid Society sent orphaned and abandoned young people from New York City to other states in an effort to remove them from the rampant poverty and crime that surrounded many of the thousands of immigrants to the city. Here is the story of the littlest emigrants, where they went, and what their lives were like once they arrived.

From the Back Cover: Essential Events explores historic happenings around the globe, and how those events have sculpted societies, the sciences, and politics.

Chapter headings include: Dire Conditions; Charles Loring Brace; Homeless Children; Newsboys and Lodging Houses; The Solution: Orphan Trains; Early Successes and Failures; Baby Trains Begin; The Movement Changes Course; and Legacy of the Train Riders.

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About the Author: Kristin F. Johnson teaches college writing and lives in Minnesota. Johnson has won several writing awards, including the Loose-Leaf Poetry Series Award, the Loft Literary Center’s Shabo Award for Children’s Picture Books Writers, and the Mystery Writers of America Helen McCloy Award.