Reading and Reinterpreting Picture Books on Children’s Television: Implications for Young Children’s Narrative Literacy

Bookaboo is a television programme aiming to promote literacy and reading among young children. In each episode, a celebrity reads a book to Bookaboo, a dog who plays the drums in a rock band, in order to help him overcome stage fright. Using the episode featuring the picture book (Cowell and Layton in That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown, 2006) as a case study, this article explores how this type of adaptation of picture books transforms the original narrative, with implications for children’s developing narrative literacy. Taking a multimodal social semiotic perspective, this study investigates the changes in meaning which result from the employment of semiotic resources such as animation, sound, and camera movement in the representation of the book on the television show. We argue that the deployment of such resources can subtly reshape the meanings expressed through the modes of language and images in the original picture book, potentially affecting the child viewer’s engagement with the narrative. Examining the use of these resources in the picture book’s televisual representation is thus an important first step towards developing frameworks for evaluating the ability of television programmes that incorporate picture book reading to support children’s literacy.     

Correction to: Examining Agency in Children’s Nonfiction Picture Books

Children's Literature in Education - In the original publication of the article unfortunately contained a mistake in the name of co-author Vera Sotirvoska.The correct name should be Vera...     

Pictures in Pictures: Art History and Art Museums in Children’s Picture Books

Children’s picture books that recreate, parody, or fictionalize famous artworks and introduce the art museum experience, a genre to which I will refer as “children’s art books,” have become increasingly popular over the past decade. This essay explores the pedagogical implications of this trend through the family program “Picture Books and Picture Looks” conducted at the Art Institute of Chicago. Program sessions were observed to learn the extent to which picture books featuring the painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 (Seurat) informed and impacted children’s experiences with the original artwork. The books Katie’s Sunday Afternoon (Mayhew, 2005), Babar’s Museum of Art (De Brunhoff, 2003), and Willy’s Pictures (Browne, 2000) provided the foundation for the program. In addition to these three books, The Dot (Reynolds, 2003), which does not include a reference to La Grande Jatte (Seurat, 1884–1886), acted as a “control” variable. This research demonstrates that while most picture books can be used to establish a level of comfort in an environment that is new to children, those that directly referenced the painting provided a base level of knowledge from which children could confidently draw upon encountering the original work. The research further indicated that, when used in conjunction with original artworks, children’s art books provide unique and distinct entry points for talking about art. The inclusion of artwork in children’s picture books elicits an enthusiasm and recognition that enhances the museum experience, and such books can be effective tools for enabling reflective, imaginative experiences with art.     

The Role of Drawing in Young Children’s Construction of Science Concepts

It has been observed that many young children like making marks on paper and that they enjoy the activity. It is also known that children’s drawings are vehicles for expression and communication. Therefore, it would be logical and reasonable for teachers to incorporate children’s drawings into building science concepts. To demonstrate how drawings are utilized to help a child to acquire a science concept, the article first presents a vignette of an interaction between an adult and a 5-year-old boy, focusing on the science concept of the physical characteristics of a spider. It is then followed by several analytical explanations of how drawings build children’s understandings. Not only are the introduced strategies useful for one-on-one interactive communication, but also applicable to a small group of young children. The article ends with the specifics of how these strategies were applied to a group of four children in their acquisition of the science concept of the water cycle.     

Families’ Selection of Children’s Literature Books

This study examined families’ choices of children’s literature books for joint story reading. Teachers, parents, and their children from five kindergarten classrooms participated in the study. Over a 4 months period, family members joined other parents twice a week to learn and practice story reading techniques. They selected children’s literature books that were of interest to both of them and their children and were developmentally appropriate. Family members were interviewed and responded to a questionnaire before the intervention. The results provided insight in relation to the parents’ perceptions about literacy, reading with families, and story reading. All members of the families read to their children frequently or daily and engaged the children in conversations about the books read. The books chosen to be read to the children were categorized by genre, with modern fiction being the most popular genre.     

The Progress of Sugar: Consumption as Complicity in Children’s Books about Slavery and Manufacturing, 1790–2015

This paper analyzes “production stories,” a genre of information literature and media responsible for teaching children how everyday things are made. As nineteenth-century families increasingly consumed tropical commodities produced by slave labor, including sugar, tea, coffee, rum, and tobacco, the production story developed in Britain and the United States as a way to explain to children where everyday household goods originate, making global trade networks visible in the home. These “production stories” developed strategies for raising or eliding ethical questions posed by who makes things, under what conditions, and for whom. Focusing on stories of sugar production, I find that production stories reveal surprising details about technical processes for making things, but conceal the human cost of production. They also end with consumption, when children use the products, symbolically affirming the conditions under which they were made. Drawing on scholarship from the history of technology and the history of the Atlantic slave trade, I contend that problematic representations of manufacturing processes feed into and support whitewashed histories for children. I conclude by analyzing contemporary picturebooks that resist certain genre patterns and encourage positive identification with enslaved black characters, who like child readers, are at once makers, readers, and consumers.

     

Early Childhood Teachers as Socializers of Young Children’s Emotional Competence

Young children’s emotional competence—regulation of emotional expressiveness and experience when necessary, and knowledge of their own and other’s emotions—is crucial for social and academic (i.e., school) success. Thus, it is important to understand the mechanisms of how young children develop emotional competence. Both parents and teachers are considered as important socializers of emotion, providing children experiences that promote or deter the development of emotional competence. However, compared to parents, early childhood teachers’ roles in socializing young children’s emotional competence have not been examined. Based on the findings from research on parental socialization of emotion, in this theoretical review we explore possible teacher roles in the development of young children’s emotional competence. Additionally, we suggest future research focusing on early childhood teacher socialization of emotion, and discuss theoretical and practical benefits of such research.     

The Picture of Madness–Visual Narratives of Female Mental Illness in Contemporary Children’s Literature

This article analyses a selection of contemporary children’s visual texts (for economy and specificity ‘contemporary’ is taken to mean the current century), covering a cross-section of age demographics to better understand how the texts depict female characters suffering with mental illness. It examines these primary texts not only to see how such characters are represented but also to see whether they either bolster or challenge the idea of the female being viewed as the male's ‘Other’. A brief historical and cultural contextualisation of the relationship between mentally ill females and the male-centric profession of modern psychiatry is followed by a close analysis of four primary texts, analysing visual narratives of mentally ill female characters in two picture books, an illustrated book and a graphic novel, noting how contemporary visual depictions contrast with early ideas and images supporting the nineteenth-century feminisation of madness. The conclusion is that, from the limited selection of texts analysed, contemporary children’s visual texts represent a clear contrast to the historical image of the frail and winsome madwoman. The findings are that they do not uphold the image of the female madwoman as Other.     

The Effects of Play Tutoring on Young Children’s Cognitive Performance

Abstract

Seventeen preschoolers were divided into a play tutoring group and a skills tutoring group. Subjects in the first group received nine 20-minute sessions in which an adult attempted to enhance their make-believe play. The other group received an equal number of skills tutoring sessions. Both groups received a comparable amount of adult contact. The subjects were assessed on measures of play quality, verbal intelligence, and creativity , on three occasions: prior to training, immediately after training, and three months later. Results showed that the play tutoring and skills tutoring treatments both resulted in stable gains in verbal intelligence and ideational fluency. Neither treatment resulted in significant increases in play quality. It was concluded that the play tutoring gains were caused by adult contact rather than by enhanced levels of play.     

Do Worlds Have Corners? When Children’s Picture Books Invite Philosophical Questions

In this article, we want to present and analyse the picture book The World has no Corners (2006/1999) by the Norwegian author and illustrator Svein Nyhus. The book represents a new trend in Norwegian picture books for children by inviting the readers into a world of thinking and wondering about existential topics such as life and death, growing up and getting old, God, children’s relationship to nature, etc. The picture book does not give clear answers to the questions that are raised, but has a potential for exploratory dialogues between child and adult readers. In our analyses of verbal text and images—and the relation between these—we build on social semiotic theory by Halliday, Kress and van Leeuwen, reception theory by Eco and Iser, and aesthetic theory represented by Dewey and Rorty. Through analyses of some selected spreads, we want to show both the framework keeping the readers inside the text, and the indeterminacies inviting the readers to wonder and speculate about the questions raised. We also want to draw attention towards a special way of co-reading of the spreads. Compared with the process of reading picture books where the adults often confirm or correct the child readers’ way of putting their interpretation into spoken language, the co-reading between children and adults in this picture book seems to be rather existential and poetic as well as democratic. We will shed light upon this reading process, as we consider it as a way of the readers fortifying themselves into the world.     

Authenticity,Past and Present in Ghanaian Children’s Literature

In this paper we explore the portrayal of the “authentic” past in children’s literature in Ghana, as well as the problems it poses for the achievement of the broader goal of moulding children to fit into tomorrow’s society. We look at two main aspects: the social and moral settings portrayed in selected books. The social order refers to the time and place in which the story is set, as well as the nature of social organization pertaining to this setting. The moral order denotes the moral and psychological implications of the physical and social environment. Based on these criteria, we examine some unsuccessful texts and contrast them with successful ones. Our aim is to explore how tradition, more broadly conceived, can be effectively used in children’s books in order to combine the goal of cultural preservation and transmission with other equally lofty ones such as stimulating children’s imagination, arousing and sharpening their perception, developing their sense of observation and critical thinking, and shaping their emotional potential.     

Scaramouche Goes to Preschool: The Complex Matrix of Young Children’s Everyday Music

This article examines everyday musical practices and their connections to young children’s learning and development, in and through music. It begins with a discussion of music learning in early childhood as a form of participation and levels of intention in learning. Next, conceptions of child that have dominated early childhood music education discourses are discussed, along with other factors that are known to influence children’s musical lives, such as spatiality, repertoires and the politics of participation. Three illustrative vignettes that stem from the author’s experience as an early childhood music educator and researcher are presented throughout the text. Implications for early childhood education are outlined at the end.     

A Phonetic Study of Young Children’s Speech

Abstract. The author examined the effectiveness of training in symbolic logic for improving students' deductive reasoning. A total of 116 undergraduate students (approximately equal numbers of men and women) enrolled in 1st-year university philosophy courses in symbolic logic participated in 2 studies. In both studies, students completed booklets of categorical and conditional syllogisms at the beginning of the course and again at the end of the course. In Study 2, students also specified their reasoning strategies. Results indicated that students' strategies changed with training (students increased their use of mental models and mental rules with categorical and conditional syllogisms, respectively), but their reasoning performance improved only moderately. The educational implications of these results are explored.     

The Narrator’s Pangs in Pangs of Love : Uncertainty of Cultural Identity

Pangs of Love tells the experiences of Chinese American immigrants, and especially the pangs the narrator, as a second generation, feels in family, love and social affairs. Based on the analysis of the narrator’s pangs, this paper argues that it is mainly the uncertainty of cultural identity that leads to the pangs of the narrator, and of the second generation Chinese Americans. This paper shows that the second generation can take advantage of their dual but conflicting cultural heritages to develop a renewed and specific cultural identity.     

‘Keep Telling Until Someone Listens’: Understanding Prevention Concepts in Children’s Picture Books Dealing with Child Sexual Abuse

Children’s picture books dealing with the topic of child sexual abuse appeared in the 1980s with the aim of addressing the need for age-appropriate texts to teach sexual abuse prevention concepts and to provide support for young children who may be at risk of or have already experienced sexual abuse. Despite the apparent potential of children’s picture books to convey child sexual abuse prevention concepts, very few studies have addressed the topic of child sexual abuse in children’s literature. This article critically examines a selection of 15 picture books (published in the US, Canada and Australia) for children aged 3–8 years dealing with this theme. It makes use of an established set of evaluative criteria to conduct an audit of the books’ content and applies techniques of literary discourse analysis to explain how these picture books satisfy criteria for child sexual abuse prevention. The analysis is used as a way to understand the discourses available to readers, both adults and children, on the topic of child sexual abuse. Key themes in the books include children’s empowerment and agency, and the need for persistence and hope.     

The Young Man’s Madness in The Raven

The raven is a narrative poem written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. It tells of a talking raven’s mysterious visit in a midnight to a distraught lover, tracing the lover’s slow fall into madness. The lover is lamenting the loss of his beloved, Lenore. The raven, sitting on a bust of Pallas, seems to further instigate his distress with its constant repetition of the word"Nevermore".