Informational Picture Books for Children by 
New Directions in Picturebook Research by
In this new collection, children's literature scholars from twelve different countries contribute to the ongoing debate on the importance of picturebook research, focusing on aesthetic and cognitive aspects of picture books. Contributors take interdisciplinary approaches that integrate different disciplines such as literary studies, art history, linguistics, narratology, cognitive psychology, sociology, memory studies, and picture theory. Topics discussed include intervisuality, twist endings, autobiographical narration, and metaliterary awareness in picturebooks. The essays also examine the narrative challenges of first-person narratives, ellipsis, and frame-breaking in order to consider the importance of mindscape as a new paradigm in picturebook research. Tying picturebook studies to studies in childhood, multimodality, and literacy, this anthology is a representative of the different opportunities for research in this emerging field.
Picture Books for Children by
Providing descriptive annotations of the best children's picture books published in the last decade, this comprehensive overview is perfect for librarians, teachers, parents, daycare providers, and anyone who works with young children. It is both an excellent tool for collection development and an abundant resource for planning storytimes and other children's programming. With selections based on proven appeal and quality, Northrup's survey features An introductory essay on the nature of the picture book, and an explanation of the evaluation criteria Bibliographic information on each picture book, including author, illustrator, publisher, date, and age recommendation A thorough index for quick reference and an appendix of additional suggested resourcesPacked with ardent and insightful recommendations, this book makes it a snap to select and use just the right picture books.
Picturing the World by
Enrich your library collection with outstanding informational books that children really want to read. This annotated resource by veteran children's book reviewer Isaacs surveys the best nonfiction/informational titles for ages 3 through 10, helping librarians make informed collection development and purchasing decisions. With information on 250 books, this volumeFeatures an introductory chapter which takes a close look at what makes a successful informational picture bookProvides thoughtful descriptions for each title, including complete bibliographic information, age-level guidance, and notes on book awards wonWorks as curriculum support as well as a tool for elementary RA, with easy-to-use topical organization and a separate subject index Picturing the World is an invaluable aid to librarians and educators in their ongoing search for high quality informational children's books.
Words about Pictures by
A pioneering study of a unique narrative form, Words about Pictures examines the special qualities of picture books--books intended to educate or tell stories to young children. Drawing from a number of aesthetic and literary sources, Perry Nodelman explores the ways in which the interplay of the verbal and visual aspects of picture books conveys more narrative information and stimulation than either medium could achieve alone. Moving from "baby" books, alphabet books, and word books to such well-known children's picture books as Nancy Ekholm Burkert's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Gerald McDermott's Arrow to the Sun, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and Chris Van Allsburg's The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, Nodelman reveals how picture-book narrative is affected by the exclusively visual information of picture-book design and illustration as well as by the relationships between pictures and their complementary texts.
Exploring Student Response to Contemporary Picturebooks by
Despite being a source of continuing interest to educational scholars, research into the literary understanding of elementary school students has emphasized written materials over multimodal mediums such as picturebooks. Focusing on students in Grades one and five, this book describes children's interpretations of and responses to a variety of contemporary picturebooks, specifically those books that employ Radical Change characteristics and metafictive devices. In dealing with picturebooks, Sylvia Pantaleo seeks to show the ways in which literature teaches artistic codes and conventions, critical thinking skills, visual literacy skills, and interpretative strategies. Aside from investigating specific picturebooks, Pantaleo discusses the broader implications of reading, viewing, and creating print and digital texts in schools. These exercises, she argues, reflect the changing nature of communication and representation in the world of elementary school students. Incorporating postmodernism, social constructivism, and other theoretical frameworks, Pantaleo contextualizes her research and examines ways in which literature highlights broader social and cultural characteristics. An extensively researched look at the pedagogical value of literature in the classroom, this book introduces new dimensions to discussions of contemporary picturebooks in elementary education and the social nature of intertextuality.
Show Me a Story! by
Summary: Max and Mickey; Miss Nelson; Pack, Quack, and Mrs. Mallard; Pigeon; Sylvester; John Henry; and a very hungry caterpillar - these are just a few of the beloved picture book characters discussed in Show Me a Story.
Teaching Thinking Skills with Picture Books, K-3 by
This step-by-step introduction to teaching thinking skills in the primary grades will be useful to teachers, librarians and staff development personnel. It will be of particular interest to teachers of the gifted. Each thinking skill is explained in a full-page reproducible format followed by a page offering booktalks to be used to introduce favorite picture books that can be used to teach that skill to young children and two pages of reproducible activities for the children to practice the newly learned skill. Over 30 skills are taught ranging from analogy to hypothesizing to inferring to patterning and reversible thinking. This book will be a logical companion to Teaching Thinking Skills with Fairy Tales and Fantasy (Teacher Ideas Press, 2005) that focuses on teaching these skills to older students.
Using Picture Books to Enhance Children's Social and Emotional Literacy by
Summary: Social-emotional literacy training assists students in developing important life skills such as the ability to develop good relationships and empathy skills, as well as being able to understand, manage and communicate their own emotions. This book offers an introduction to social-emotional literacy, followed by activities related to emotions such as empathy, friendship, grief and self-esteem, aiming to embed this literacy training into daily school and home activities to increase children's chances of future success.
Fleas, Flies, and Friars: Children's Poetry from the Middle Ages by
Medieval children lived in a world rich in poetry, from lullabies, nursery rhymes, and songs to riddles, tongue twisters, and nonsensical verses. They read or listened to stories in verse: ballads of Robin Hood, romances, and comic tales. Poems were composed to teach them how to behave, eat at meals, hunt game, and even learn Latin and French. In Fleas, Flies, and Friars, Nicholas Orme, an expert on childhood in the Middle Ages, has gathered a wide variety of children’s verse that circulated in England beginning in the 1400s, providing a way for modern readers of all ages to experience the medieval world through the eyes of its children. In his delightful treasury of medieval children’s verse, Orme does a masterful job of recovering a lively and largely unknown tradition, preserving the playfulness of the originals while clearly explaining their meaning, significance, or context. Poems written in Latin or French have been translated into English, and Middle English has been modernized. Fleas, Flies, and Friars has five parts. The first two contain short lyrical pieces and fragments, together with excerpts from essays in verse that address childhood or were written for children. The third part presents poems for young people about behavior. The fourth contains three long stories and the fifth brings together verse relating to education and school life.
From the Garden to the Street by
From John Bunyan's'country rhimes'to rude chants about Manchester United, from Ted Hughes to Edward Lear, and from William Blake to the Taylor sisters, Morag Styles covers three hundred years of poetry with infectious enthusiasm and a keen critical eye. In this scholarly and fascinating book, she provides an informative account of the history of poetry written for children in Britain and America in the last three centuries. She analyses the major poets, genres and developments over this period, and traces the continuities between the past and the present. Styles asks fundamental questions which have often been left unanswered: What do we mean by children's poetry? Why did such a seemingly small number of women write poetry for children until recently? The author subscribes to the widest possible definition of poetry, and so the reader will find in this book hymns, songs, playground rhymes, raps and verse - whether trivial or profound. From the Garden to the Street will provoke, inform and entertain academics of children's literature, those who teach it in the classroom, and all of us who still take pleasure in the poetry of childhood.
Poetry and Childhood by
Poetry and Childhood'is the first academic book to give serious critical attention to the poetry of childhood. This international volume brings together poets including Philip Gross, Andrew Motion, and, Michael Rosen - the latter both former Laureates - and distinguished critics such as Teresa Cremin, Peter Hunt, Lissa Paul, David Rudd, Chip Sullivan, Laura Tosi, and Victor Watson. The collection is based on a prestigious conference organised by Morag Styles for the British Library and the University of Cambridge. Contributors of international renown look at key poets of childhood from the past, including John Bunyan, Robert Lois Stephenson, AA Milne, Ted Hughes, and, Charles Causley, and at the poetry for children by present English Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. They consider the major traditions and forms of poetry, take a new look at comic verse, develop fresh perspectives on nature as a central theme, and celebrate the importance of poetry as an oral medium. The voices of children, poets, parents and teachers responding to poetry are featured throughout. Though primarily aimed at scholars and teachers of children's literature, this collection is for everyone who is interested in poetry or children.
American Poetry by
American Poetry offers a collection of 26 verses by our finest poets, all with their unique perspective on the land they loved and accompanied by remarkable paintings that enhance the meaning of the words. Here, beautifully illustrated, are such unforgettable works as Robert Frost's pensive “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Ralph Waldo Emerson's powerful “Concord Hymn,” Langston Hughes’ majestic “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Carl Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia,” and Maya Angelou’s “Harlem Hopscotch.” Of course, some poems are just sheer fun—especially the beloved ode to our national pastime, “Casey at the Bat.”
FEG: Ridiculous [Stupid] Poems for Intelligent Children by
Summary: A collection of twenty-three poems celebrates the joy of language and includes educational and explanatory notes.
Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets by
Summary: Newbery Medalist and a Caldecott Honoree offer a glorious, lyrical ode to poets who have sparked a sense of wonder. Out of gratitude for the poet's art form, Newbery Award-winning author and poet Kwame Alexander, along with Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth, present original poems that pay homage to twenty famed poets who have made the authors' hearts sing and their minds wonder. Stunning mixed-media images by Ekua Holmes, winner of a Caldecott Honor and a John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award, complete the celebration and invite the reader to listen, wonder, and perhaps even pick up a pen.
Over the River and Through the Wood by
Summary: Over the River and Through the Wood is the first and only collection of its kind, offering readers an unequaled view of the quality and diversity of nineteenth-century American children's poetry. Most American poets wrote for children--from famous names such as Ralph Waldo Emerson to less familiar figures like Christina Moody, an African American author who published her first book at sixteen. In its excellence, relevance, and abundance, much of this work rivals or surpasses poetry written for adults, yet it has languished--inaccessible and unread--in old periodicals, gift books, and primers. This groundbreaking anthology remedies that loss, presenting material that is both critical to the tradition of American poetry and also a delight to read. Complemented by period illustrations, this definitive collection includes work by poets from all geographical regions, as well as rarely seen poems by immigrant and ethnic writers and by children themselves. Karen L. Kilcup and Angela Sorby have combed the archives to present an extensive selection of rediscoveries along with traditional favorites. By turns playful, contemplative, humorous, and subversive, these poems appeal to modern sensibilities while giving scholars a revised picture of the nineteenth-century literary landscape.--Back cover.
Rainbow Soup by
Summary: An introduction to poetry that uses humorous poems, illustrations, and annotations to clarify terms and explain different types of poems, such as macaronic verse, concrete poems, and limericks.
Children's Literature and Story-Telling by
Africa's encounter with the West and its implications and consequences remain far-reaching and enduring in the craft and thrust of its creative writers. The contributors to ALT 33 analyse the connections between traditional stories and myths that have been told to children, as well as the work of contemporary creative writers who are writing for children in order that they understand this complex history. Some of these writers are developing traditional myths, folk tales, and legends and are writing them in new forms, while others focus on the encounter with the West that has dominated much modern African literature for adults. The previous neglect of the cultural significance, study, criticism and teaching of children's literature is addressed in this volume: How can the successes and/or failures of stories and story-telling for children in Africa be measured? Are there models to be followed and what makes them models? What is the relationship between the text and the illustration of children's books? What should guide the reader or critic of children's literature coming out of Africa - globalism, transculturality or internal regionalism? What problems confront teachers, students, publishers and promoters of children's books in Africa?
The Myth of Persephone in Girls' Fantasy Literature by
In this book, Blackford historicizes the appeal of the Persephone myth in the nineteenth century and traces figurations of Persephone, Demeter, and Hades throughout girls' literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illuminates developmental patterns and anxieties in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Nutcracker and Mouse King, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, and Neil Gaiman's Coraline. The story of the young goddess's separation from her mother and abduction into the underworld is, at root, an expression of ambivalence about female development, expressed in the various Neverlands through which female protagonists cycle and negotiate a partial return to earth. The myth conveys the role of female development in the perpetuation and renewal of humankind, coordinating natural and cultural orders through a hieros gamos (fertility coupling) rite. Meanwhile, popular novels such as Twilight and Coraline are paradoxically fresh because they recycle goddesses from myths as old as the seasons. With this book, Blackford offers a consideration of how literature for the young squares with broader canons, how classics flexibly and uniquely speak through novels that enjoy broad appeal, and how female traditions are embedded in novels by both men and women.
Oral Literature for Children by
This book is the first ever major effort to document and study hundreds of texts from an African (Ugandan) oral culture for children – folktales, riddles, and rhymes – and at the same time to make them available in the local languages and to focus on their cultural and national value. The author surveys the history of collecting in Uganda and situates the texts in their broader geographical, historical, socio-cultural and educational setting, including the early collecting efforts of heritage-minded Ugandans and European missionaries. Most of this preservational work is elusive and under-explored – so that the present book constitutes a major pioneering summary of Ugandan oral culture for children.The book addresses key questions such as: What happens when we collect, transcribe, and translate an oral text? How do we transfer components of the oral text to the page? What are the challenges of translating oral forms targeting specifi¬cally a child audience, and what choices ought to be made in the process? The book provides possible ways of rethink¬ing the debate about orality and literacy as modes of representation – the generic interrelationship between the oral and the written text, and how the two can enter dialogue through transcription and translation. The latter are effective means to archive these oral forms for children and use them to promote literacy and numeracy skills in predominantly oral communities.In the current institutions of formal education in Uganda, this coexistence of orality and literacy is evident in the class¬room environment, where the oral text is turned into words on the page to encourage literacy. Through transcription, the collector is able to capture oral texts in other forms – audio, written, visual, and digital. With the new technologies available, the task is not as arduous as in the past, and the information thus captured is made available in all its wealth for purposes of instruction or entertainment.
The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove by
The fairy tales collected by the brothers Grimm are among the best known and most widely-read stories in western literature. In recent years commentators such as Bruno Bettelheim have, usually from a psychological perspective, pondered the underlying meaning of the stories, why children are so enthralled by them, and what effect they have on the the best-known tales (Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty) and shows that the Grimms saw them as Christian fables. Murphy examines the arguments of previous interpreters of the tales, and demonstrates how they missed the Grimms'intention. His own readings of the five so-called'magical'tales reveal them as the beautiful and inspiring'documents of faith'that the Grimms meant them to be. Offering an entirely new perspective on these often-analyzed tales, Murphy's book will appeal to those concerned with the moral and religious education of children, to students and scholars of folk literature and children's literature, and to the many general readers who are captivated by fairy tales and their meanings.
The Faerie Queene As Children's Literature by
Summary: "Edmund Spenser's vast epic poem The Faerie Queene is the most challenging masterpiece in early modern literature and is praised as the work most representative of the Elizabethan age. The poem was later made over as children's literature, retold in lavish volumes and schoolbooks and appreciated in pedagogical studies and literary histories"-- Provided by publisher.
Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis by
Imagination has long been regarded as central to C. S. Lewis’s life and to his creative and critical works, but this is the first study to provide a thorough analysis of his theory of imagination, including the different ways he used the word and how those uses relate to each other. Peter Schakel begins by concentrating on the way reading or engaging with the other arts is an imaginative activity. He focuses on three books in which imagination is the central theme—Surprised by Joy, An Experiment in Criticism, and The Discarded Image—and shows the important role of imagination in Lewis’s theory of education.
Mirror, Mirror by
Celebrating the motherdaughter bond around the world, a storyteller teams up with her daughter to assemble this collection of forty folktales that span the globe, from France's version of Cinderella to less well known stories from Sudan and China. 15,000 first printing.
Powerful Magic by
This book delves deeply into children's responses to literature, and in particular, to works of fantasy.
World Folklore for Storytellers: Tales of Wonder, Wisdom, Fools, and Heroes by
Summary: Folklore goes back as far as human history. It is the collected lore of the folk, of people everywhere. This book narrows the subject to concentrate only on folktales, the stories of the people.
