Returning to Bukhara after a prolonged exile, Hodja Nasreddin finds his family gone, his home destroyed, and his city in the grasp of corrupt and greedy rulers who have brought pain and suffering upon the common folk. But Hodja Nasreddin is not one to bow to oppression or abandon the downtrodden. Though he is armed only with his quick wits and his donkey, all the swords, walls, and dungeons in the land cannot stop him! Leaning on his own experiences and travels during the first half of the 20th century, Leonid Solovyov weaves the many stories and anecdotes about Hodja Nasreddin - a legendary folk character in the Middle East and Central Asia - into a masterful tale brimming with passionate love for life, liberty, and happiness.

It is an old, yet relevant, argument that education needs to focus more on real-world issues in students’ lives and communities. Nevertheless, conventional school curricula in many countries create superficial boundaries to separate natural and social worlds. A call for science learning approaches that acknowledge societal standpoints accumulate that human activities are driving environmental and evolutionary change which has lead scholars to investigate how different societies respond to environmental change. Children and Mother Nature is a multilingual volume that represents indigenous knowledges from various ethnic, linguistic, geographical, and national groups of educators and students through storytelling. Authors have identified indigenous stories, fables, and folk tales with a theme of human-nature interaction and facilitated storytelling sessions with groups of students in K–8 grade (5–14 years old) in Turkey, Greece, US, Jamaica, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Chinese and Korean language speaking communities in the US. Students have discussed and rewritten/retold the stories collaboratively and illustrated their own stories. All student-told stories are presented in the original language along with an English translation. This volume provides authentic materials for teachers to use in their classrooms and could also be of interest to educational, literary, and environmental researchers to conduct comparative and international studies.

A charmingly illustrated collection of old Turkish tales.