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ENTRY TYPE: new
WORK TITLE: All about U.S.
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.mattlamothe.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in ME.
EDUCATION:Rhode Island School of Design, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, animator, and illustrator. Also works at a small design firm called ALSO.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 18, 2024, Kathleen McBroom, review of All About U.S.: A Look at the Lives of 50 Kids from across the United States, p. 38.
Horn Book, July-August, 2017, Roger Sutton, review of This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from Around the World, 153.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2017, review of This Is How We Do It;May 15, 2024, review of All About U.S.
School Library Journal, May, 2017, Melissa Smith, review of This Is How We Do It, p. 115.
WebOnlyReviewsSLJ, September 13, 2024, Cat McCarrey, review of All About U.S., p. 1.
ONLINE
ALSO website, https://www.also-online.com/ (December 19, 2024), author profile.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (August 3, 2017), Julie Danielson, author interview.
Matt Lamothe website, https://www.mattlamothe.com/ (December 19, 2024).
Young children are naturally curious about the lives of other children who live in far-off countries. Matt Lamothe’s This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from Around the World is a book that addresses just that. But it’s also a book reminding child readers that, while the everyday lives of people across the globe may have a whole host of differences, there are many similarities as well, many things that unite us.
In the book, readers meet seven children – Ribaldo in Peru; Romeo in Italy; Daphine in Uganda; Oleg in Russia; Kian in Iran; Ananya in India; and Kei in Japan. They may be illustrated here, but they are real children, living their lives in cities across the planet. We learn where they live, what they wear to school, what they eat for breakfast, how they learn, how they play, where they sleep, and much more. It’s a busy book, filled with information, making the final spread all the more striking. Here we see a night sky with a full moon on a full-bleed spread: “This is my night sky.” We all share the moon, after all, and the great Earth it looks upon.
For the book, Matt communicated with seven children all over the world---he explains how below---and gathered the details of their everyday lives. The result is a smart and engaging book; an excellent addition, in particular, to social studies and geography curricula. It is, as the Kirkus review notes, a “global introduction that goes beyond the usual symbols and sights.”This is How We Do It Int-2
I talked to Matt via email about the book and how he went about gathering data for it.
Jules: Can you talk about how a trip to Uganda inspired this book?
Matt: I was on a trip to Uganda with a friend whose sister works as a primatologist in the forests there. This was my first trip to Africa, and I’d been primed by mass media to think that it would be dangerous and that people's lives would be unrelatable to my own.
But my experience was so different; I felt misinformed and uneducated. I was introduced to several Ugandans who worked as field assistants in the forest and was struck by how relatable and familiar they were. We spoke about our exploits in elementary school, fixing up houses, and mothers-in-law. We had many things in common, like getting in trouble for goofing off in class. And [we talked about] some experiences that were very foreign to me, like a teacher who'd had the "sleeping sickness," which caused her to fall asleep briefly and frequently throughout class. There were definitely differences between our lives, but mostly within a larger, more common framework.
Throughout the trip, I kept thinking about the most direct way to share this mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar with others. I felt a book for kids would be a great way to introduce this concept early in life.
Jules: Can you describe how you went about locating the families who shared their daily routines for this book -- and how you communicated with them and gathered info?
Matt: I wanted This Is How We Do It to include a range of children from different geographic regions, from both rural and urban settings, within a similar age range, and ideally of a median income for their country. I thought that seven children could show a broad range of cultures and locations from around the world, but it was a small enough number that children reading the book wouldn't get overwhelmed.
Finding kids with these specific requirements proved difficult. Through complex chains of friends of friends of friends and family and co-worker connections, I slowly established communication lines to the seven families in the book. It took about half a year to find everyone.
For each family, I made an "instruction packet" that had questions about the child's day, along with thumbnail illustrations and directions for taking photographs to document their home, clothes, family etc. For the families that needed one, I sent a camera as well. For both the Russian and Iranian families, we ended up translating the text. Almost all communication was done through email, although in Uganda we also used WhatsApp to text back and forth.
After waiting a few weeks (or months), it was really exciting to get back the responses and photos of each child's day. I then spent the following year poring over all of the imagery as references for the illustrations in the book.
Jules: I like your reasoning behind choosing real children around the world.
Matt: The choice to use real children, instead of made-up characters for the book, felt like a natural way to make the experience of a different culture authentic and relatable. I remember as a kid learning about other cultures in books, and a typical page would show "Pierre lives in Paris and loves to eat baguettes." The books were filled with cultural stereotypes that may have been true, but because the characters in the books weren't actual people, they were as real to me as characters in a fictional story — interesting, but still fiction.
By using real kids, not only does the reader learn about cultural specificity, but they also see that people are individuals within their culture and that they have their own unique day that may or may not line up with prevailing cultural expectations.
Jules: Why did you decide to put your own information about your everyday life on the jacket flap and not in the text?
Matt: Kids love to see what other kids do, and I think it has more of an impact on them if they see other countries through the eyes of their peers. If there had been an adult in the mix, it might have given them pause.
I included myself in the jacket flap so readers would know I was a real person, too, and that I also have a daily routine. The endpapers of the book include a world map that shows the location of all the children, and I added myself there as well, so readers could see that I was geographically from a different part of the world than the kids featured in the book.
Jules: What's next for you?
Matt: I've been working on a few ways of expanding This is How We Do It by creating lesson plans for a classroom that teachers can use and making an activity book that prompts children to document their own daily activities in the same way as the book's participants.
Aside from that, I'm trying to switch gears a bit and have been mulling over some fiction story ideas.
Jules: Thanks for chatting, Matt!
Julie Danielson (Jules) conducts interviews and features of authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children's literature blog primarily focused on illustration and picture books.
Matt Lamothe is an illustrator.
Matt Lamothe is part of Also, a small design firm.
Matt Lamothe is the author of “This Is How We Do It.”
Matt Lamothe is interested in old houses.
Matt Lamothe loves sleeping in.
Matt Lamothe lives near the foothills of Mt. Adams in Washington.
Matt Lamothe is an illustrator and animator. He is part of ALSO, a small design company he started with friends from the Rhode Island School of Design. When he's not on the computer, he finds comfort in pastries, coffee, and basic carpentry. He lives and works in Washington.
Matt Lamothe
is ALSO‘s animator as well as innovator, researcher, and tech support. He never takes shortcuts, and loves experimenting with new techniques. Matt hails from Maine, although he did spend some formative years in the South. He has a degree in Animation from RISD, where he met Julia & Jenny.When not staring into the lights of the internet, he finds comfort in pastries, coffee, and basic carpentry.
LAMOTHE, Matt with Jenny Volvovski. All About U.S.: A Look at the Lives of 50 Real Kids from Across the United States. illus. by Matt Lamothe. 84p. Chronicle. Aug. 2024. Tr $19.99. ISBN 9781797213705.
K-Gr 4—A grandiose and ambitious project, this book dives into an unflinchingly honest look at children's lives throughout the United States. Based on years of interviews, these vignettes present one kid per state. Each page features a brief description of a child's day alongside a lush illustration of their home, starting from the eastern coast and moving westward. Readers see traditions or hobbies, collections or chores. Some lives are familiar, others not so much. But all show family structures bursting with love. In the back matter, real photos of the kids and their homes drive each anecdote home. There are also fascinating demographic charts comparing the book families with countrywide statistics. These include breakdowns of groupings tracked by the Census and by Pew Research Center, like race and religion. This is the type of comprehensive book that can be useful for family reads, school projects, and everything in between. It's impossible to read this and come away with anything but connection and love for other people.
VERDICT: A richly compassionate look at people's lives, this book covers childhood in a way that readers will appreciate and love. It's a gripping read for elementary grades and beyond.—Cat McCarrey
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
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McCarrey, Cat. "All About U.S.: A Look at the Lives of 50 Real Kids from Across the United States." WebOnlyReviewsSLJ, vol. 70, no. 9, 13 Sept. 2024, p. 1. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810820633/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3a5905f4. Accessed 23 Oct. 2024.
Lamothe, Matt ALL ABOUT U.S. Chronicle Books (Children's None) $19.99 8, 6 ISBN: 9781797213705
Fifty real children, one from each state, describe their families, daily lives, interests, and hopes.
Using an intensive selection process involving census records and questionnaires, Lamothe, the author of the similarly themed This Is How We Do It (2017), and writer and designer Volvovski profile 50 children, ages 5 to 11--not as supposed representatives of the states they happen to live in, but of children everywhere in this country. The entries feature half-page summaries of video-chat interviews and painted images of the young people with their homes and families. Seven-year-old Ramon has to keep his Hot Wheels collection in bins in the hallway, since he shares a bedroom in Rhode Island with his mom and sister; 11-year-old Betsy (Alabama) gets in trouble for reading while driving her motorized wheelchair; and while her dads in Wyoming prepare dinner, 6-year-old Charlie talks about her dance classes and how she wants to be an astronaut veterinarian when she grows up. What emerges is a rich, thought-provoking work that proves that despite our differences, there's much that we share. Though acknowledging that multiracial children are overrepresented here (but with some justice, as it reflects a documented trend), the authors finish off with bar graphs showing that overall they are presenting a reasonably accurate demographic picture of young America in all its diversity while convincingly suggesting that, as they put it, "we have more in common than we may think."
Methodical, inspiring, and consistently enlightening. (sources) (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Lamothe, Matt: ALL ABOUT U.S." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793536970/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4bc345c6. Accessed 23 Oct. 2024.
All about U.S.: A Look at the Lives of 50 Kids from across the United States. By Matt Lamothe and Jenny Volvovski. Illus. by Matt Lamothe. Aug. 2024. 80p. Chronicle, $19.99 (9781797213705). Gr. 3-6. 305.230973.
In 2022, Lamothe (This Is How We Do It, 2017) sent out a national call for ordinary families who wanted to share slices of their everyday lives. The 231 responses were culled to create a representative group whose demographics (race, religion, family structure, housing, etc.) closely aligned with national figures. The finalists, one from each state, filled out surveys, sat for interviews, and provided video tours of their houses and yards. All this research culminated in 50 profiles of real kids proudly showing off their grown-ups, siblings, pets, interests, and hobbies. There's an amazing amount of information packed into each four- or five-paragraph entry, and very detailed illustrations based on family photos show the subjects in action, usually including outdoor vistas. This engaging compilation has multiple applications, from allowing for cultural, geographic, and community comparisons to supporting units on diversity, acceptance, and inclusion to modeling prompts for autobiography projects. Readers will probably go right to their own state--and then find themselves hooked. The back matter explains the data-collection process in student-friendly terms and includes photos of all the kids. There's also a list of sources for report writers. A fun, factual, and engaging resource.--Kathleen McBroom
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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McBroom, Kathleen. "All about U.S.: A Look at the Lives of 50 Kids from across the United States." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 18, 18 May 2024, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804017494/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d6b9a73d. Accessed 23 Oct. 2024.
This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from Around the World
by Matt Lamothe; illus. by the author
Primary Chronicle 48 pp. 5/17 978-1-4521-5018-5 $17.99
"This is me," announces the opening spread, while seven children, ages seven to eleven, smile out at the viewer and introduce themselves with their names and nicknames. Successive spreads show panels of each child's home, family, school attire, breakfast, school transport, teacher, classroom, handwriting, lunch, playtime, chores, dinner, evening, and bed. Finally, unpanelled and stretching across the double-page spread, a single shared image: "This is my night sky." The countries represented are India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Peru, Russia, and Uganda; readers will enjoy making cultural comparisons (Romeo from Italy calls his teacher Luisa; India's Ananya calls hers Aarti Bathla Ma'am) as they follow each child through his or her day. The neatly schematized organization plays nicely with the cozy digital illustrations, and there's a judicious mix of panel placement and size in the clean design, with some topics covered in seven vignettes on one double-page spread and others spread across two. Appended family photographs demonstrate that these are all real portraits of real children; a glossary defines and expands unfamiliar terms; endpapers display a world topographical map with markers for each child's location, in case you want to pay a visit. ROGER SUTTON
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
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Sutton, Rogger. "This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from Around the World." The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 93, no. 4, July-Aug. 2017, pp. 153+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A500260400/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=38db1cc9. Accessed 23 Oct. 2024.
Lamothe, Mat THIS IS HOW WE DO IT Chronicle (Children's None) $17.99 5, 2 ISBN: 978-1-4521-5018-5
Children from around the world describe "how we do it."As described in an author's note, seven children and families (from Italy, Japan, Peru, Russia, Uganda, India, and Iran) provided photos and information on daily life used as research for stylized yet realistic digital illustrations that fill this large-format, very attractive picture book and the text. Each section starts with a statement: "This is me"; "This is where I live." The explanatory text for each child can sometimes feel static, with occasional words defined in the glossary, but it is really the contrasting pictures, side by side, that are the attraction here. Many double-page spreads show examples from all seven countries, such as the page that focuses on chores. All seven children describe their tasks: Daphine, from Uganda, sweeps the yard with a small broom; Oleg, from Russia, vacuums; and Ribaldo, from Peru, helps with farming. Occasional topics demand multiple double-page spreads, as in a sequence that shows the children's varying paths to school. No real social issues are mentioned, although a flashlight illuminates Ribaldo's table as he helps his brother with homework, and Daphine has 69 children in her class at a "private school." All families introduced are headed by heterosexual parents. Actual photos of each family appear at the end, and the endpapers feature a world map with the homes of the seven children indicated. A global introduction that goes beyond the usual symbols and sights. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 6-10)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Lamothe, Mat: THIS IS HOW WE DO IT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2017, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A489268542/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f2bd4c3a. Accessed 23 Oct. 2024.
LAMOTHE, Matt. This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from Around the World. illus. by Matt Lamothe. 52p. glossary. maps, photos. Chronicle. May 2017. Tr $17.99. ISBN 9781452150185.
K-Gr 3-An illustrated take on how seven real kids from different countries go about a typical day. Each spread introduces a new topic (family, teachers, chores, dinner, play, etc.) and dedicates a panel to each child, identified by country, with glossary words underlined ("Iran: I live in a second-floor apartment in the city of Gorgan, close to the Caspian Sea."). Lamothe was able to create the digitally rendered illustrations based on photos sent to him by the families featured (a family photo for each child is included at the end). The muted palette in combination with the level of detail makes for a pleasing visual experience. An ending spread with a night sky scattered with stars and a glowing full moon is accompanied by the words, "This is my night sky," hinting that though these kids may lead very different lives, they all sleep under the same sky. In the "Meet the Families" section, Lamothe emphasizes that "not everyone in Peru likes to play soccer, and not everyone in Japan eats fish for breakfast," smartly communicating that the work is just one representation of much larger, complex communities. Endpapers provide a visual map of each child's name and country, including a cameo of die author. VERDICT A good purchase to refresh social science and geography collections.--Melissa Smith, Royal Oak Public Library, MI
Caption: This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from Around the World (Lamothe)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
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Smith, Melissa. "Lamothe, Matt. This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from Around the World." School Library Journal, vol. 63, no. 5, May 2017, p. 115. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A491032211/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8b329725. Accessed 23 Oct. 2024.