Corvallis author shares stories of the desert.

The first-graders at Periwinkle Elementary School were full of questions Friday morning about the Arizona desert: Does it ever rain there? How do cactuses store all that water? Are there any camels?

The answer to that last question is no, Corvallis author Shannon Young explained to them. “There aren’t any camels in Arizona,” she said. “But if they were, I bet they would be in the shade at the base of a saguaro.”

Young, who lives in Corvallis but attended college in Arizona, loves the chance to share the beauty of the desert with Oregon children who might have never seen a desert or a cactus in person. And she’s had a lot of opportunities to share her message of desert appreciation in the past year, since her bilingual children’s book “The Little Saguaro/El Sahuarito” was published.

Set in Arizona, Young’s book tells the tale of a mother cactus, her daughter and the desert life around them. Although Young wrote the book in English, her publisher, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, suggested publishing it in both English and Spanish.

At Periwinkle, Young brought along a 6-foot-tall inflatable saguaro to show the students and answered questions about the desert and her book. She read the book in English, and then her friend Victoria Martinez read it in Spanish.

“How many of you have heard Spanish before?” Martinez asked the children. Hands shot up around the room. “Good! Spanish is such a beautiful language. I want you to listen and see if you can hear some words that are the same in both English and Spanish.”

Periwinkle is an English language learner school, so the dual-language story fit in with what students are already learning. In the first-grade classroom, items around the room were labeled with both their English and Spanish names.

“It’s wonderful to see the children react to both the English and the Spanish,” Young said. She said visiting with kids is her favorite part of promoting her book. “It’s really a thrill.”

The book, which won a medal from the Independent Publisher Association in 2008, includes a glossary of desert life and has been used to teach science as well as language skills, Young said