Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two Children Tell
by Virginia Lowe
This study looks at young children’s understanding of the reality status of stories and pictures (e.g. “Animals can’t talk!” “Is this a real story?”) from birth to eight. It is based on a reading journal in which all the books read to two children, and responses to them, were recorded.- Areas covered are:
- Infant book behaviour
- What is real, what pretend?
- Picture conventions
- The illustrator’s role
- The concept of author
- Emotions of characters
- Identification
- Humour and irony
- One of the children is male
- Starts with them as infants
- The different environment and experiences of a second child
- Ages birth to eight
- Investigates the reality question
“At a time when multi-modal representations of real and fantasy worlds penetrate far into children’s lives, this book presents a powerful argument for sharing conventional texts with children. All teachers of young children should read it to give them a sense of the long-term power of the reverberative text.” Henrietta Dombey in the blurb.
Virginia's book Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two Children Tell will be published by Routledge (London) in November, 2006. You can order a copy from Virginia.