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Thoughts On The Problems With Boys And Picturebooks
UPDATE: Here is the latest hand-wringing on boys and books, this time from Jonathan Emmett. The New Statesman has published an article by Jonathan Emmett who points out that the picturebook world is dominated by women. I’m simplifying here, but basically he argues that this is one problem with picturebooks today, and the feminisation of […]
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Touch Interactivity And Animation In Storybook Apps
App developers would do well to remember that when it comes to providing a reading experience that is developmentally valuable for young children, it’s as much down to what the app doesn’t do, as what it does. a commenter on the Guardian article: Alarm Bells and Whistles Many of the first digital picturebook apps (‘storyapps’…
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The Age Categories of Picture Books
“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” C.S. Lewis The publishing world can’t run properly unless books are connected to the right readers and when it came time to upload the app onto iTunes we had to decide what age the ideal reader…
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The Musicality of Picture Books
Listening to a folktale — or a children’s book — is more like listening to a musical piece than reading a modern novel. It is normal to listen to musical pieces more than once, under different circumstances, and performed by different musicians.
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Close Reading: Bringing reader and text closer together
First up, Larry Ferlazzo has a great list Close Reading: Am I Getting Close? from Learning Is Growing Does Background Knowledge Matter to Reading Comprehension? from Russ On Reading What, exactly is close reading of the text? from Grant Wiggins. Part two is here. The first chapter of the book Notice and Note by Beers and Probst…
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Unusual Eating Phobias
Getting annoyed at someone when we listen to them eating or breathing is called Misophonia, and it’s an actual neurological disorder. Here are some more strangely specific fears: Header painting: Adolphe Millot illustration of a wide variety of fruits and vegetables from Nouveau Larousse Illustre, (1898) fruits and vegetables
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Things Possible With Digital Stories Which Are Not So Possible With Paper Stories
A lot is being said about all the ways in which ebooks and tablet books are not as good as ‘real books’: you can’t smell them, there’s screen glare, you don’t know where you are up to in the book… Ebooks “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another…
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The Colour Of Sky In Art And Illustration
In Western cultures at least, little kids first learn to draw with a blue or (black for night-time) sky, and a yellow orb for the sun. In reality, sky can be many different colours.
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Teaching Advanced Visual Literacy
People now unblushingly use the term ‘visual literacy’ when a few decades ago the concept, never mind the term, was undreamed of. Such an enormous shift in our ways of understanding the world and ourselves will undoubtedly have had an impact upon a form of text like the picturebook that self-consciously exploits the pictorial as a way of making meaning.
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What Is Interanimation in Literacy?
Header painting: Eastman Johnson – The Lesson. An excellent example of red and blue as a colour palette.
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Symbolic Annihilation and Symbolic Glorification
Symbolic annihilation is used to highlight the erasure of peoples in popular communication, including in children’s books, of course.
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Censorship of Children’s Books
App stores add an extra layer of ‘censorship’ when it comes to creating content for children.
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Reading Pictures Is A Skill In Its Own Right
Any sort of close reading of a picture book turns the reader into a semiotician. What does this mean?
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The Opposite Of Beer Brewed By Monks
Episode 55 of the 99% Invisible podcast goes into the strange psychological phenomenon whereby certain consumers will pay huge amounts for a scarce commodity. Alcohol and handbags seem especially open to this marketing manipulation, and in this case beer, not because beer connoisseurs are being manipulated per se, but because there is a monastery in Germany whose…
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Glossary of Picturebook Terminology For Review and Analysis
Is it picture book or picturebook? When commentators put the two words together, they do so mindfully: The terminology we apply to books, texts and reading do not seem to attach to the picturebook so readily. For example, if we speak of ‘the text’ of a picturebook, do we mean the words or the words-and-pictures…
