Children's Literature reading report, 700 words only, due on tomorrow night

· is in essay format, approximate 650-750 words (introduction with thesis, development, conclusion)

· contains examples from the reading and online content to support conclusion about the book

· documentation of source in-text MLA Style and a Works Cited at the end

Evaluating Children's Books

Before selecting a book for children review its text and illustrations. Children's literature is replete with examples of "hidden" messages, unarticulated ideas that are communicated in words and drawings. For example, some books reinforce stereotypes about who can be brave and strong, who needs to be "saved," who creates problems, who "saves the day," and who makes important decisions. Children need to see in books many kinds of people who are problem-solvers to counter some powerful, prevailing stereotypes and systemic, societal inequity. First and foremost books have to be good literature, compelling stories that keep the attention of young readers and listeners. If a story isn't good, even books with positive messages and brightly colored drawings stand a good chance of being rejected by discerning young readers. Books are often not perfect, that is to say there may be some wonderful things about a particular book, and also some aspects of the book that are not so wonderful. ADL's rule regarding such books is: use your judgment and if the good parts outweigh the bad, select it and use the occasion of reading that book aloud as an opportunity to talk to children about the parts of the book that you don't like. Teach children to be critical readers by asking open-ended questions, such as: why do you think that character did what she did? Look at the book's illustrations and ask children to describe how they think the characters feel in certain situations. Ask how they think they might feel in a similar situation or if they have ever felt that way themselves. Checklist For Assessing Children's Literature The following are some things to consider when selecting books for children. Some of these questions can be used to evaluate a single book; however, the questions are most effective when used to review a complete collection of books. While every children's book cannot possibly meet every standard of excellence, in many instances, the value of a particular book will outweigh those aspects that might be questionable or problematic. Parents, teachers and other caregivers should examine children's books for such things as historical accuracy, realistic depictions of a variety of lives, believable characters, authentic language and age appropriateness. Books should represent a variety of settings, problem-solving approaches and themes, and should provide opportunities for children to consider multiple perspectives and values. At their best, multicultural children's books can and should speak to all children.

Nicolette Jones

Children's apps: 'Technology interferes with the story in most apps'

Lots of developers and publishers are exploring the potential of interactive picture book-apps for children, but can they ever hope to deliver a reading experience comparable to books? Author and critic Nicolette Jones remains to be convinced.

“I’m very impressed with those sorts of apps that tell you something around a book – what Egmont did with the War Horse app, or what Hot Key Books did with Maggot Moon, or Hero On a Bicycle, with its online presence that told you about Italy during the war,” she said, speaking at The Bookseller Children’s Conference in London.

“What I have more reservations about, although I see some publishers working very hard at it, are the kind of apps that replace a book. Picture book apps. I’ve never seen a picture book-app that does something that a book doesn’t do better.”

Jones is the children’s books editor for the Sunday Times, who estimates she is sent between 40 and 50 books a week for potential review, but who has also explored the growing number of book-apps available.

As a journalist, I’ve written regularly and enthusiastically about these kinds of apps, and their potential to complement (note: not replace) printed books.

My first response to Jones’ comments was to feel a bit defensive, then, but the more I listened, the more I thought about where her criticism was coming from, and why it sparks some important debate for anyone making children’s apps.

Jones cited an example: a figure of a child running, which in an app, might have an animation triggered by a tap from the reader. “The child keeps on pressing it, and the figure goes on running,” she said.

“In a picture book, if a child is drawn running, in your head they run over to the next page where something else is happening. In a peculiar way, the technology interferes with the story in most of the apps I see.”

I was keen to ask Jones whether she sees this as an intrinsic, unsolvable problem with apps and interactivity in general, or whether it’s just that not enough developers and publishers have made apps whose features serve the story (and children’s comprehension of it) rather than interfere with it.

When a microphone came near in the Q&A section of her session, I asked, and Jones was keen to clarify her comments.

“I can see some publishers like Nosy Crow doing fantastically well with very interesting apps, and trying to reproduce the quality of a book. There’s a lot of energy and creativity and intelligence going into this, and I don’t want to be too dismissive,” she said.

“What works for me is the stuff that extends the book. Apps, they replace the space in your imagination with something that’s... the interactivity is appealing for children, but the best picture books are interactive in another way.”

As an example, she talked about the book There Are No Cats In This Book, where children are encouraged to physically interact with the pages. Jones also talked about interactivity in another way: the interaction between children and parents while reading together.

“If you look at a book with a small child, it’s a hug,” she said, making a gesture to show a parent with a child sitting in their lap, and an open book in front of them.

“With a device over here, there isn’t that relationship, and it doesn’t go through the adult,” said Jones, motioning to an imaginary tablet by a child’s side.

“But there’s still a place to go to find ways that what technology can do, which is amazing, will do something special and beyond and valuable which isn’t interfering with the story, or replacing the imagination. That’s my particular bugbear.”

I think Jones’ views are an important challenge to people making children’s apps that involve stories and reading, just as The Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson’s criticism of apps in 2011 was a challenge.

How are apps going to use interactivity and multimedia to do something “special and beyond and valuable”? How can they best serve storytelling and reading and children’s imaginations, rather than just giving them things to tap and swipe on?

I don’t think apps can or should replace reading physical books with children – I’m a tech journalist with devices coming out of my ears and my two children get (carefully limited) tablet time every day, but when we settle down for their bedtime stories, it’s always books – but I think more developers can rise to Jones’ challenge and prove that apps can tell a story beautifully, rather than just extending books.

Kate Wilson, the MD of the company mentioned by Jones – Nosy Crow – has similar views, publishing a blog post late last night with her response to the discussion earlier in the day.

“I think that it is possible to create apps that deliver stories well and that involve children in new ways in the story,” she wrote, suggesting that it’s more important than ever for publishers to be exploring digital reading, to ensure that the growth of devices doesn’t have a negative impact on children’s skills.

“I can absolutely imagine a scenario in which mass literacy is just a historical blip; something that started in in the 19th century and lasted until the middle of the 21st. Technology could easily make the ability to decode text irrelevant. I think that would be a terrible thing,” wrote Wilson.

“I want to give children the incentive to learn to decode text. I think we can do that best by making sure that we use technology to engage children with reading in every way that we can.”

Often, when I write about children’s apps for The Guardian, commenters steam in with variations on the argument “children should be READING books not jabbing at screens”.

The inherent assumption here – that kids can’t do both over the course of their week, with good parenting the key to ensuring screen-jabbing doesn’t squeeze out reading – really bugs me. But I see where the view comes from: the importance of reading, as well as that one-on-one time with a parent that often comes with it.

The best book-apps should be able to deliver both of those things, and the considered criticism from experts like Nicolette Jones is an incentive for more developers to strain to reach those heights.

• 50 best apps for kids from 2013 that parents can trust • Minecraft, YouTube, David Walliams: children’s books in 2014

Kate Wilson

A defence of story apps after a speaker at The Bookseller Children's Book Conference said that apps interfered with story

I spent yesterday at The Bookseller’s Children’s Conference.

It was a good day. Informative data shared. Interesting people met and re-met. A new prize for YA fiction announced. Tom Bonnick spoke very well in just ten minutes about some of the ways that Nosy Crow uses and reuses content in print and digital form without hesitation, repetition or deviation. And things that were said at the conference reminded me of some important things. Here are just a few of them:

1. We need, as an industry and a company, to think harder and better about representing diversity in children’s books.

2. As an industry, we continue to under-acknowledge the role of illustrators (Axel Scheffler’s name was not mentioned once by any speaker other than Tom, despite many references to The Gruffalo and other bestsellers that he’s contributed so much to).

3. Nosy Crow is different from a corporate children’s publisher in many ways, and we need to continue to make that difference an advantage.

But there were things said that I didn’t entirely agree with. One of them was said by Nicolette Jones, who reviews children’s books for the Sunday Times and is deeply engaged with the world of children’s books. I have massive respect for Nicolette, and see eye-to-eye with her on many things. But I disagree with her about apps.

Nicolette said that she had “reservations” about picture book apps, on the basis that the printed book “does it better”, and went on to say that the “technology of the app interferes with the story”. She worried that “interactivity in apps replaces the space in children’s imagination”, and that “the app doesn’t go through the adult”. She said that the only apps she’d found successful were apps like the Touchpress Warhorse app, and Hot Key’s Maggot Moon app which provided additional material around each book, which, in itself, remains unaffected by the surrounding multimedia or animation material.

I love print books. I love print picture books. Publishing books that work well on the printed paper page is not just key to Nosy Crow’s commercial success but one of the things that excites us every day… and, in fact, Nicolette mentioned Open Very Carefully as a book that was both interactive and used the printed page particularly well. But I also love story book apps. I think that making multimedia, interactive apps that still deliver a narrative successfully is a challenge that Nosy Crow rises to. Apps are not books, and books are not apps. Successful making of story apps requires an understanding that apps are another country, and we should do things differently there.

When we are making apps, we think hard about narrative, as, I hope, blog posts like this one about the differences between writing picture books and apps suggest. In each scene in our story book apps, we deliver the narrative before we enable interactivity, so that the child has that part of the story delivered to them before they can explore the scene further. We try to ensure that interactivity reinforces understanding of character: the extra, non-linear, touch-prompted dialogue between Cinderella’s stepsisters creates a sense of them as different characters in our Cinderella app. One sister is vain, and one is jaded. We try to ensure that interactivity reinforces story: in our Rounds: Franklin Frog app, which is a non-fiction story of the lifecycle of a frog, we have worked hard to ensure that the frogspawn behaves like frogspawn, drifting back into a sticky mass after it’s been disturbed, and that, when the child helps the tadpole to escape its egg, there’s a level of jelly-like resistance which means that the child has to pull at the surface of the egg several times before the tadpole is released.

Of course (and I would say this, wouldn’t I?), we see terrible examples of picture book apps where the multimedia and the interactivity do interrupt the story, and where there are features that are introduced just because the developer can introduce them. I have, for example, seen Three Little Pigs apps in which the straw and stick houses, having been destroyed with some kind of interactive touch, spring back into shape again immediately, so the child can knock them down again. Fun, maybe, but narratively all wrong: the point – the moral – of the story is that those two lazy pigs’ houses are destroyed completely by the wolf’s huffing and puffing, and the child must understand that the resilience of the brick house is what makes the third pig different. In our Three Little Pigs app, needless to say, the first two houses don’t spring back into their former shapes after the reader helps the wolf to destroy them either with a tap, or by huffing and puffing into the microphone. Apps can increase children’s sense of ownership of, and engagement with, the story as they are making the events unfold themselves – or even, in the case of our Little Red Riding Hood app and Jack and the Beanstalk app, themselves influence the direction of the narrative. As this young child said to a teacher in a recent guest blog post, “I like the series Nosy Crow and the apps that they make because they tell you the story and you get to play the story at the same time.”

So I think that it is possible to create apps that deliver stories well and that involve children in new ways in the story… and I think it’s important that we try our hardest as a company to make sure that apps that do just that.

Because…

First, however lovely it would be to think that there are, throughout the world, and certainly up and down the United Kingdom, young children who can, any time they want to, clamber up into an adult’s lap and share a picture book with them, I don’t think that’s how life is. I think that story book apps with audio that a child can trigger may increase children’s access to text-based stories: when an adult is busy (working, cooking, with another child), the child can still listen to a story at their own pace. And I think that interactive “hot spots” may encourage children to explore the detail of illustration more carefully than they might in a print book. Besides, I really don’t see why adults shouldn’t share apps with their children in just the same way that they share print books with them. Anecdotally, from our social media and other contact with parents, that’s just what the parents who read picture books to their children but also have access to iPads do.

Second, there are children for whom interactivity and multimedia are invaluable supports to the pleasure they get from story. A good example of such a child would be Ines, who is seven and who has Down’s Syndrome, and whose mother wrote this blog post for us earlier this week about the apps, including Nosy Crow story apps, that Ines loves. There’s a picture of Ines at the top of the post, really engrossed in our Little Red Riding Hood app. Ines’s mother has tweeted to say, “Ines now enjoys sharing the real books of the stories that the Nosy Crow apps have introduced her to. For her, the apps have been a bridge.” (The use of “real” in that tweet is telling, though…)

And, third, even if we’re not talking about children for whom multimedia and interactivity might be a particular welcome support, the truth is that children are spending more and more time in front of screens, many of them touchscreens. Various speakers at the conference today spoke about the hugely increased access to touchscreens. Alison York from Nickelodeon shared their research which suggested that 51% of 3 to 15 year-olds in the UK now have a tablet at home – a percentage that has doubled since 2012. If children are spending a lot of time with touch-screen devices, I think that we should want reading to be part of the entertainment they find there. And I think that, if they find reading there, it has to compete effectively with other things they find in the same place – TV, games and social media. I think that children, especially young children, don’t differentiate between different kinds of media that they find on the touchscreen. They expect interactivity and multimedia from any media they find there. So my heart sinks when I see young children presented with a standard ebook (or a poorly thought-through app) on a touch screen: in my experience, they tap, with increasingly disconsolate randomness, at anything and everything, before giving up. I have said it before, and I will say it again: I do not think reading should be the most boring (i.e. least competitive with other media) that children can do on a touchscreen.

Bev Humphrey, who’s a literacy and technology consultant and an ex-school librarian, spoke today about children and young people increasingly using screens for reading outside school, and preferring screen to paper. She also spoke about schools recognising ebooks an incentive to draw children, particularly reluctant readers, into reading. I think that there is a generation of children that we have to serve well with imaginative and compelling digital reading experiences that use the features of the devices in children’s hands in the same way that creators from other media backgrounds do. I can absolutely imagine a scenario in which mass literacy is just a historical blip; something that started in in the 19th century and lasted until the middle of the 21st. Technology could easily make the ability to decode text irrelevant. I think that would be a terrible thing. I want to give children the incentive to learn to decode text. I think we can do that best by making sure that we use technology to engage children with reading in every way that we can.

I disagreed with something another speaker said too, but I’ll leave that for next week’s post…

Tagged with apps, digital reading, ipad, ipad and learning disability, narrative, picture book apps, picture books, reading for pleasure, special needs, story, story apps, storytelling, writing for children, writing picture books