1.1 The Benefits of Children’s Literature

 

Imagine what it must be like to be a newborn: You’ve left a world of warmth, comfort, and consistency and have been thrust into a place of unpredictable noises, bright lights, and comparatively rough handling. The regular heartbeat and soft sounds of the liquid environment that has enveloped you for the past nine months are suddenly gone, replaced by electronic beeps, sharp bangs and clangs, and loud and unfamiliar voices.

 

Remarkably, newborn infants do have some resources to cope with the strange environment in which they find themselves. Neurotypical infants can track a brightly colored ball as it passes in front of their eyes, and they can recognize a human face. If their hearing is functional, they will respond to a familiar voice, preferring a voice whose music they have heard while in the womb. They have instincts for sucking and vocalizing that prompt responses from adults. Thus, they already have many of the tools they need to begin the long process of ordering, understanding, interacting with, and manipulating their world.

 

However, as neuroscientists are quick to point out, all human infants are born prematurely, meaning that despite the nine months of development in the womb, the human brain and body still have a long way to go in terms of developing neural connections and pathways that coordinate both thinking and moving. To become fully human, infants need to learn how to use language the way other people in their culture do, how to read and interpret images and gestures, how to regulate their emotions and behaviors, how to communicate with others and take up a meaningful place in that culture as individuals, how to find out things they don’t know, and how to participate in community activities and rituals.

 

This is where children’s literature comes in. Through storytelling, poetry, song, and printed texts, children learn how their culture is organized, what it values, how it differs from other cultures, how they can both assert and develop their individuality, and how they can become valued and responsible members of a community.

That seems like a lot of weight to put on children’s books, which on the surface may seem simple, sentimental, or sometimes even silly. But throughout this book, we will explore the richness of the interaction between children and quality literature. Children’s literature, through its forms, its messages, and the conversations it inspires, helps children understand the complex world they have entered. It expands their capacity to enjoy that world by providing pleasure. It may even help them change their world by stimulating their imaginations and developing their intellects.

Consider, for instance, the picturebook Swimmy (1963), by Leo Lionni. Swimmy is the lone black fish in a school of red ones. Besides being a different color, he is also a faster swimmer than his fellow fish, which is why he alone escapes on that fateful day when the rest of his brothers and sisters are swallowed up by a larger fish. After the loss of his family, he swims around the ocean and meets many wonderful and unique creatures, but he is lonely for his own kind. When he meets up with a new school of small red fish, he joins them and teaches them that together they can camouflage themselves in such a way as to scare off big fish—they mass into a big fish shape themselves, with Swimmy as their black eye.

 

As children enjoy this story of a small fish who uses his intelligence and his physical difference to solve a problem, they learn many things about the social organization of their world. They learn, for instance, that big fish eat small ones and that this is a problem for small fish. They learn that being different can be hard but that it has its rewards. They learn that the world is full of strange and mysterious things that are worth finding out about. And finally, they learn that working together can save them from danger. These messages are similar to other Lionni books, which often feature characters whose difference and special qualities are essential to the success of the group. As children grow, they will face many pressures to talk, act, and think like everyone else, but Swimmy is accepted for who he is because the group recognizes that they need him to be and think differently than they. His story expresses a core cultural value of accepting and honoring individual differences.

 

Different books offer different messages about a range of cultural values. Sometimes, these messages are explicit and easy to understand. Often, though, they are subtle, and child readers absorb them unconsciously as they enjoy the story. One of the reasons it is important for parents, professional caregivers, and early childhood educators to study children’s literature is because children’s literature always teaches children something about the world, and we need to be aware of what those lessons are. Because children have limited experience with the world around them, and because their brains are so active in taking in new information and making connections, they are remarkably open to both the overt and the subtle messages embedded in the stories we share.

1.2 What Do Children’s Literature Researchers Study?

 

There are many ways to go about the study of children’s literature. Literary researchers, for instance, study the literature itself. They might look at books, folk stories, poems, and films from a historical perspective, asking why certain stories and poems become classics. Alternately, they might look at form, that is, how the art and the words of children’s books invite children to read them, and how those forms have changed over time. Still other literary researchers focus on the messages of children’s literature, as we just did with Swimmy, to try to determine how these messages are communicated to children through their books. They call these sorts of messages ideologies, which are the unconscious beliefs and values that underlie our behavior. Our cultural beliefs and values seem like common sense to us, when really they have been taught to us through various means, including children’s literature, throughout our lifetimes.

 

Scholars in the fields of Education and Library and Information Sciences focus more on the interaction of children with books. They want to know how to get children to engage with books so that they can meet educational and personal goals and enrich their lives through reading. Educators understand that children acquire literacy and literary understanding in stages, and they research how engagement with literature helps children progress through these stages. Librarians are committed to a practice they call a readers’ advisory, which aims to put the right book in the right person’s hand at the right time. In order to help children engage with books, teachers and librarians need to understand something about children’s preferences as well as have a broad knowledge of what sorts of books are available.

1.3 What Will You Study About Children’s Literature in This Book?

 

This book will introduce strategies from all of these different ways of looking at children’s literature, which includes not only printed books, but also oral stories and poems, music, film, and digital media. In Chapter 2, you will see how the history of children’s literature reflects the ideas society has had in different periods about who children are and what they need. You will learn how to analyze pictures and stories in Chapters 3 and 4 so that you can assess them for quality. And throughout the book, you will explore how the interaction between adults, children, and developmentally appropriate, quality literature enriches children’s lives.

 

Of course, one of the primary purposes of children’s literature is to help children learn to read. Learning to read, however, is much more complicated than simply knowing which marks on a page correspond to which sounds. In order to be truly literate, children must learn to make meaning from texts and pictures, to transform the words on the page into mental images of places, characters, and things that move and interact with one another. They need to connect causes and effects and problems and solutions, and they need to be able to follow paths of growth and development as they unfold. As we move through the chapters of this book, we will think carefully about how children’s brain development grows alongside their increasing language and literacy development. This introductory chapter will offer an overview of how these factors interact, while Chapters 6–10 break down the interaction more precisely and suggest how to select and share developmentally appropriate, quality literature with children at different stages of their reading development.

 

Additionally, in this first chapter we will explore the various resources available to help readers find good books. In studies that focus on community and state literacy rates, researchers have found that access to many good books is the single most important factor affecting successful literacy acquisition (McQuillan, 1998; Shin, 2004). Ensuring book-rich environments for all children should thus be a top priority for early childhood educators. Throughout this book, we will discuss the types of books available for children and the appropriate ages at which to introduce them.

 

By the end of this book, then, you should feel confident in your ability to find, select, and share quality, developmentally appropriate literature with young children from birth to age 8.

What Does “Developmentally Appropriate” Mean?

 

“Developmentally appropriate” is a loaded term when it comes to describing literature for children. To assess whether a book is developmentally appropriate, however, we need to understand how language development and literacy are connected and how learning happens, but perhaps most importantly, we need to be attuned to children’s preferences and emotional concerns.

It is tempting to rely solely on a mathematically based formula for assessing reading level and call that “developmentally appropriate.” Most publishers of children’s books produce series of leveled readers, that is, books that have been run through a formula that calculates variables such as sentence length, percentage of difficult words, and average number of syllables per word. What these formulae don’t take into account is reader interest and developmental age, which produce motivations or barriers that can often differ greatly from a simplistic assessment of reading level. For instance, Scholastic Inc., the largest publisher and distributor of children’s books in the world, has a resource on their website called the Book Wizard, where you can enter the title of a book and obtain a reading level for that book. According to their leveling system, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight has a reading grade level equivalent of 4.4 (Twilight, n.d.). This means that 50% of all students in their fourth month of fourth grade have attained the reading level necessary for understanding the words and sentence structures of that book. By contrast, the interest level of the book is listed as grades 9–12. However, no consideration beyond interest is given to the appropriateness of the content for the developmental age of the child. For examples of the various formulae used to determine readability levels.

 

In this book, we take a holistic approach to determining developmental appropriateness by focusing on children’s preferences and their developmental concerns. We believe that while children need appropriate supports in learning to read, they are more likely to want to read if the literature they encounter is interesting to them, which means that it corresponds to the concerns of their developmental age. Moreover, they will stretch to more difficult texts if their prior experience with literature is engaging, meaningful, and satisfying. In Chapters 6–10 we focus on the kinds of texts most likely to correspond to abilities and preferences correlated with developmental age as well as where children are in their literacy development. We also use these factors to suggest the most effective ways to share those texts with children to ensure that they acquire fluency and confidence in reading.

1.4 Changing Definitions of Literacy

 

Literacy seems to have always been a vexed issue. Over the years, people have worried about how to teach it, who has access to it, how it is related to power and progress. Definitions of literacy have changed over time. For instance, in the early 19th century in America, the ability to sign one’s name was all it took to be considered literate. However, prior to that, beginning in the 1600s in the colonies, local schools supported by their communities in New England fostered high levels of literacy in order for children to be able to read and understand the Bible. These local schools did not last through the Revolutionary War, but by the end of the 1700s, the idea of public, state-funded schools had caught on in New England with the interesting fact that the ability to read was a prerequisite for the 7-year-olds who wanted to attend the public grammar school, at least in Boston. The idea of secular, compulsory public schooling was introduced in the 1800s, a move that fostered the universal expectation of literacy for all citizens, if not its actualization.

 

The 20th Century: Dick and Jane Versus Eloise

 

During the 20th century, literacy always seemed to be in a state of crisis, a phenomenon epitomized by the mid-century book entitled Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can do About It (Flesch, 1955). A 1954 article in Life magazine claimed that one of the main reasons children didn’t learn to read well was that the primers used in schools were boring. They featured spiffy, White, middle-class children who were universally good-natured and always did the right thing; rather than challenging children with adventure and conflict and acknowledging the fact that bad decisions often turn into the best stories.

More interesting books were out there, certainly, featuring rambunctious, humorous characters making dubious choices. Consider Curious George (Rey, 1941), The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Potter, 1902), and Eloise (Thompson, 1955), just to name three books available at the time. But books like these weren’t being used in schools to teach children how to read. The director of the educational division at Houghton Mifflin, William Ellsworth Spaulding, presented the findings of the Life article as a challenge to his friend Ted Geisel, who, nine months later and using a pen name, presented him with a manuscript for The Cat in the Hat (Seuss, 1957). This book used only 236 words, all but 13 of which appeared on a list of words every first grader should know, and started a revolution of sorts in early reader books by combining education and entertainment. Arguably, though, this trend started long before Dr. Seuss, as we will see in Chapter 2. It might be more accurate to say that Seuss’s Beginner Books series presented the first significant challenge to school curriculums in the 20th century, in that the books paid attention to the needs of reading instruction at the same time as they sought to tell interesting stories.

 

The emphasis in this midcentury literacy crisis mentality centered on students’ ability to access traditional forms of reading and writing in a single language, and it arose at least in part out of a general philosophy of standardization and assimilation. In other words, this anxiety arose out of the belief that the purpose of schooling was to ensure that everyone could function at roughly the same level in the national language and achieve a certain level of what E. D. Hirsch in the 1980s called “cultural literacy.” Hirsch’s project caused some controversy, however, and not long after he published his authoritarian, directive curriculum of “what every American needs to know” (Hirsch, 1988), the emphasis shifted away from assimilation and shared cultural knowledge to an emphasis on showcasing and honoring cultural and linguistic diversity.

 

In the 21st century, given this shift in sensibility and the significant changes wrought by technology on our daily lives, educators are now being asked to radically re-conceptualize our ideas of literacy. Children today are growing up in an increasingly image-rich and media-saturated culture. Becoming literate means being able to “read” not only print but also images, moving images, and soundtracks designed to appeal directly to their emotions. While there is widespread worry that this increase in media will detract from traditional literacy acquisition and result in a decline in the habit and ability to read (see, for instance, NEA, 2004), an expanded definition of literacy can actually be quite helpful in considering literature for young children.

 

Multiliteracies

 

The New London Group (NLG), a group of 10 well-known literacy educators from the United States, Australia, and Great Britain, advocates for a shift in understanding and teaching literacy to incorporate multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996; Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). They suggest that we focus on six different ways that we make meaning:

 

linguistic literacy, which includes elements of tradition verbal and written language;

audio literacy, which includes music and sound effects;

visual literacy, which includes elements of visual design, such as color, perspective, shape, position, and so forth;

gestural literacy, which includes behavior, gesture, physicality, feelings, movement;

spatial literacy, which includes elements of geographical and ecosystem design and architectural and sculptural design; and

tactile literacy, which includes elements of touch, smell, and taste.

According to the NLG, the ability to analyze and use these modes is necessary for both understanding our world as it is and for crafting a future that we find meaningful and fulfilling. More importantly for our purposes, however, is the understanding that these literacies are crucial for young children as they learn to read. Infants begin the process of learning to read gestures and other visual information almost immediately after birth. They also start to interpret sounds and space as they become habituated to their environments; they learn, for instance, to associate their cribs with being alone, or kitchens with community and interesting activity and smells.

 

As they grow, their understandings and manipulations of these literacies become more intentional and form the basis for their understanding of literary texts. When children have stories read to them, they use their embodied experiences to make sense of the words and pictures. They draw on their knowledge of sounds, facial expressions and gestures, spatial environments and features, what things feel and smell like, and visual information to turn words into mental images that make a story come alive. The stories themselves then expand those mental models so that they can imagine worlds and scenarios beyond their everyday experiences. This is how reading works and how it provides pleasure: It starts by linking our sensory experiences to the words on a page, and then the words on the page help our imaginations reach beyond what we have experienced into new possibilities.

 

Because good reading—that is, the ability to make meaning from texts—depends on children’s ability to employ these multiliteracies effectively, it is important that we help them build a wealth of multimodal experiences and engage them in conversations that encourage their understanding of the various modes. We will explore this process in more depth in future chapters, using the NLG’s multiliteracies as our guide and organizational strategy. Our focus is on literature appropriate for children from infancy to age 8, or third grade. However, there are differences in the ages at which children acquire literacy, as well as different terminology used by literacy specialists, so we have divided our developmental discussion into three broad stages of reading development: prereaders, new readers, and young readers. For each level, there will be one chapter devoted to the development and enrichment of audio and linguistic literacies and another that focuses on visual, gestural, spatial, and tactile literacies. For a more extensive discussion on multiliteracies and the work of the New London Group

1.5 How Does the Path to Literacy and Literary Enjoyment Begin?

 

Ellen Dissanayake, a scholar who studies the role of art in cultures around the globe, claims that the bond between infant and caregivers begins in what she and others call “communicative musicality” (2009, p. 23). Mothers and infants develop relational call-and-response patterns that bring them in sync with one another and enable bonding. Dissanayake explores this bonding behavior as an explanation for the origins of music in human society, but we can link it to how an appreciation of literature begins. The literature we share with children is a way of communicating with them the wonder and possibilities of the world we live in. And it begins with helping them recognize patterns and developing the skill of joint attention.

 

Being new to the world is certainly stressful for the baby, but having a new baby is also stressful for the caregiver; getting to know a whole new person who is wholly dependent on you for survival can be overwhelming. “Getting to know someone” means figuring out what is predictable or consistent about that person’s responses and behaviors. Part of getting to know a new baby involves actively helping the baby establish patterns of predictability that will make the baby feel safe by imposing some order on the world. One of a caregiver’s or early childhood educator’s most important roles in working with infants and young children is to help them structure their world so that they have categories and patterns into which they can fit new information. Adults help children make sense of their world.

 

Dissanayake stresses, however, that communication between adults and infants is not a one-way street. Instead, she says, babies teach adults how to talk to them by responding in different ways to different utterances. Infants are more likely to respond positively to expressions that are “simplified, repeated, exaggerated, and elaborated” (2009, p. 23). Again, although Dissanayake’s claims are made in the service of explaining how music functions in human culture, we can see how these observations of infant preferences can be mapped onto not only the kinds of music they enjoy but the literature they favor as well. Children’s poetry and nursery rhymes typically make use of the qualities of simplification, repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration.

 

Dissanayake also says that children prefer multimodal presentations—that is, through “simultaneous vocal, visual, and kinesic (relating to motion) expressions” (2009, p. 23). Children’s literature is almost always presented in a multimodal format—that is, a format that engages more than one of the five senses. Storytellers use their bodies and voices to convey their message, and often incorporate music and costuming and invite children to participate in the storytelling process, either by joining in on a repetitive refrain or by acting out a behavior. Action songs and rhymes are a large part of children’s literature and culture. But perhaps the most dominant and familiar form of children’s literature, the form that defines the genre, is the children’s picturebook—a multimodal form of infinite variety that in so many ways ushers children into the world of literacy.

 

As adults share picturebooks with children, they are engaging them in an activity that draws on all six multiliteracies in order to make meaning. While looking at the pictures and simultaneously hearing the words or having conversations about the book, children are engaged in a project of joint attention with an adult over a special kind of object. They are not eating or being dressed or rolling a ball back and forth. Instead, the adult is showing them something that they are expected to make meaning from. By pointing and directing their eyes to the pictures on the page, adults help them make the connection between two-dimensional images, spoken and written words, and objects in their world. Children begin fitting the images on the page and the words they hear into mental models they have developed from their own experiences. Eventually, they come to understand how books work. That is, they learn that images and words are not just objects to be looked at, but that they have intentions, so to speak. They are trying to say something that the child needs to try to understand. This is the starting point of print literacy.

 

Developmental Considerations

 

In first-world cultures such as the United States, literacy development is as important to children as learning to walk and talk. Researchers in the development of identity argue that this is because we develop our sense of self from words and images that are available to us, and these include images from print and nonprint literature and media (Bracher, 2009; Gergen, 2000; Strenger, 2005). Children’s texts in particular provide a range of images that children learn to identity with and imitate on the one hand, and dis-identify with and distance themselves from on the other. So it is necessary to understand how development occurs, and the role literature and literacy play in that development, in order to understand how to choose and share developmentally appropriate literature that supports healthy growth, a strong sense of self, and a positive orientation toward others.