Reading the World: What Young Children Learn from Literature

By making and sharing stories, we come to understand our world and everything in it. Our lives are enhanced by the narratives we encounter, make and share yet the time schools and pre- schools devote to reading and telling stories ever diminishes and now focuses primarily on literacy, not literature. This book is about stories and young children. The first part sets the theoretical framework: semiotics, narrative, culture, cultural tools. The second section looks at the oral tradition, wordless picture books, picture books with words, chapter books, popular culture and translation. The final section considers issues around controversy in literature, children as narrators, and what children do to adopt and subvert the world through their role play their own acted out narratives. Reading the Worldis invaluable for early years teachers, nursery nurses, teaching assistants and other practitioners, but will appeal also to parents and carers, and to students on initial teacher training courses. It will be of interest to the growing body of students following programs on children's literature and book making.

Sandra Smidt has written many books on aspects of early childhood development, her most recent being about the work of Jerome Bruner. She seeks to make the inaccessible accessible and to open the door of academic thinking to those from non traditional academic backgrounds. And like Bruner, she believes that stories are an essential way in which we learn about our world.