Play in the school setting is a highly contested issue in today's restrictive academic environment. Although many early childhood educators advocate the use of play in their classrooms and emphasize the importance of play for children's learning and development, children beyond the preschool and kindergarten years are not often afforded…

In this qualitative study, the author explores how young readers build literary understanding through performative responses in picturebook read-alouds. Performative responses allow children to create and express meaning in ways that go beyond talk and that engage their creativity and imagination. They include a variety of modalities, such as…

This article explores how reading strategy instruction that targets children's literature can unwittingly interfere with the development of a reading life. It compares the use of story-based children's literature for reading strategy instruction with the "untaught" story. It asks: What, if any, role does a read aloud that is unfettered by formal…

This article reports on a study of the responses of a second-grade class to the page breaks in contemporary picturebooks. In a picturebook, the text and accompanying illustrations are divided into a series of facing pages called openings, and the divisions between the openings are called page breaks or turns. Unlike a novel, in which the page…

One of the questions an author/illustrator of picture books is often asked is: "Who do you write and illustrate for?" This paper asserts that the most successful creations are those produced without too much concern for how they will be received, or by whom. They do not set out to appeal to a predefined audience, they build one for…

Recent studies have shown that under the influence of feminist theory, today one of the most popular areas of academic children's literature criticism is "the rereading of texts for previously unrevealed interpretations" (Paul, 2004: 142). By "rereading," academic feminist children's literature critics look at the ways ideological implications are…

A distinguished writer looks again at a favorite childhood hero--Robin Hood, a work written by Henry Gilbert. (HOD)

The fiction writer uses language to create the illusion of reality. A work of fiction is an illusion of life in which characters attempt to transform basic reality by casting their desires and views upon it, thus creating internal conflict between elements of the real and the unreal. Characters must sort out through experiences that enable them to…

Discusses how the imagination not only helps one to create fantasy worlds, but makes one's self what he or she is. (HOD)

Maintains that children's books such as "The Secret Garden" can have a strong influence on one's life. Such books offer emotionally satisfying adventures and serve as the touchstones by which we measure all literary experience. (BB)

In science and social studies, teachers continue to present lessons that generally begin and end with the facts. Teaching students to comprehend is all but forgotten as teachers frequently attempt to cover as much content as possible, regard all content as equal, and divide content into artificial categories that bear little relationship to how…

This paper, three of four on literature and the young child, investigates two more ways that a parent's simple act of reading to a child during his or her early years helps him or her grow into a successful reader, namely: reading to the child will help him or her broaden the range of experiences; and reading to the child will help him or her…

This paper explores the potential for using narrative to foster children's spiritual growth. It discusses the nature, origin and appeal of story and presents theoretical perspectives which form a rationale for using non-sectarian children's, adolescent and young adult literature for spiritual development. Such books avoid church-and-state…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 24 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the follwing: (1) the effects of junior great books programs on students' thinking and reading skills, (2) adolescent novels and the ideology of femininity, (3) the effect of…