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Littera scripta manet The Written Word Will Remain
“The written word will remain” Which words will we leave as our legacy? What we have published in books and magazines, or what we have published on blogs and ezines and Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook…? A few years ago I set about inputting all of our known family data into a family tree program.…
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Skeuomorphism In Picture Books
Skeuomorphism is a word from the world of graphical user interface design. It describes interface objects which mimic real-world counterparts in how they appear and/or how the user can interact with them. I’m starting to hear it outside tech blogs: Has Morality Become A Skeuomorph? from The Society Pages. Skeuomorphism is also useful when talking about picture…
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What makes a picturebook re-readable?
“We’re not trying to make stories that are going to be read, we’re trying to make stories that are going to be read a milliondy billiondy times.” Mo Willems While children’s books need to be re-readable, books aimed at an adult audience do not: As anyone who has ever read books to a child knows, young…
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20th Century Breakfasts In Art And Storytelling
Breakfast eating has changed a lot over time, at least in the West, which in turn has influenced other cultures. These changes have of course been reflected in children’s literature.
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Stock Yuck In Picturebooks
Children don’t tend to like green vegetables. Picture book creators know this, and often, greens are used as proxy for any yucky thing: Stock yuck.
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Nudity In Picturebooks
This morning Cosmopolitan reports that UK authors are pushing for children’s literature to include sex in fiction for kids. That’s quite a headline grabber. Of course, reading the actual article offers a less sensationalist request: They’re not asking too much, are they? Bear in mind that in the publishing world, ‘children’s literature’ includes the young…
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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…