An article in Daily Life, ‘How I’ve helped teach boys that girls are boring and unimportant’, by Kasey Edwards really made me think.
She quotes L.J. Lacey of the Melbourne children’s bookstore, Three Four Knock On The Door, saying that 90 per cent of the books she sells have a male protagonist, and customers almost never buy books for boys with a female main character. In contrast, she says, people buy books for girls with male protagonists all the time.
Edwards argues that when boys only read stories about boys or men, they’re given the implicit message that stories focusing on people who are different and whose experiences are different from their own are not worth bothering about.
She confesses that in the past when looking for a book for a boy she is as guilty as other adults of only buying books with male protagonists. It has never even occurred to her to buy a boy a book about a girl. She plans to change her habits because she believes it matters a lot in many important ways. You can read her article here.
I too must confess I tend to choose books for boys with male heroes. Two of my books have girls as main characters – The Girl in the Picture and The Girl in the App. I have never thought of giving these books to a boy to read or imagined them being bought for a boy.
Recently I sent a few of my books including these to a friend for her children, a girl aged 10 and a boy aged 11. I imagined she’d give these two books to her daughter, but a message came back that she was reading them with her son. Some good parenting going on there!
What are your book buying habits in relation to girls and boys? Any thoughts?
Footnote: I didn’t get any comments back about how you interpreted the cover of The Lost Thing so I’ve added a few things that I noticed.
The printed title. Letters of uneven sizes and in a mixture of upper and lower case with the almost childish printing of the author’s name give the title a friendly, unconventional feeling. The word Lost stands out a bit because of its rich deep reddish colour. This suggests lostness is likely to be the focus of the story.
The main framed picture. This is a picture of a fairly ordered, yet empty type of city made of a lot of unappealing concrete. Is there an echo of the Jeffrey Smart picture of The Cahill Expressway in this?
There are hints in some of the buildings on the left that the city operates like clockwork. The statue could imply the city sees itself as rather important. There could be an echo of the Statue of Liberty in the outstretched arm? Is that undercut by the figure of the statue holding what looks like a briefcase and having a box like head?
The large red out of place object that has tentacles for legs is intriguing. It seems to be moving and alive or at least in working order. Are those surfboard like things wings for it to fly? Its incongruity with the rest of the scene makes you wonder about the part this thing will play in the story.
The only human figure is bent and odd looking – a bit like a distorted version of an office worker from one of John Brack’s famous cityscapes. Yet he hasn’t been quite swallowed up by conformity as Brack’s office workers have. This figure is still curious. He is drawn to look at and think about the strange misplaced thing he sees in front of him. A sign of hope perhaps?
The framing of the image and title. Marks around the main image are very ordered though faint. There are numbers, mechanical diagrams, rectangular blocks of colour, words and sentences of different lengths and in various fonts, all given varying degrees of importance. A message given some prominence (‘A tale for those who have more important things to pay attention to’) tells of an author whose humour is gentle and who is at home with irony. A large mark next to Shaun Tan’s name looks like a postmark. It makes me feel the book is on its way to me, a message from the author. I want to open the book to see how the story unfolds.
Two books my Kindy class have enjoyed recently are:
I Spy with my little Eye by Edward Gibbs. This book gives children the chance to guess which animal is on the other side of the spyglass. They get a hint because they can see part of it. It doesn’t seem to matter when they know the answers – they just love the repetition and the chance to call out the answer again and again. A good little twist in the ending as well.
No, David by David Shannon was also a success. You can always tell when you are asked to read it again the moment you finish. The text is very simple and mainly a variation on the title. It took a while for the children to grasp that the pictures show David doing unacceptable things such as making sculptures from his food or making way too much noise. But by the time we got to David running down the street with no clothes after his bath (a deliciously funny back view), they were all conspirators with David and enjoying his unsociable behaviour. I couldn’t help thinking how amazing it is that we turn these tiny naked-when-born human beings into three and four year olds who all think the sight a boy without clothes running away from his cross mother is a great joke. You can watch the video of this story here.
If you are looking for picture books that suit all ages you can’t go past the work of Jeannie Baker or Shaun Tan. I suspect a child needs to be around 5 before they are likely to enjoy these books (please tell me if I’m wrong) but their insights and way of telling bring immense pleasure to many different age groups. You don’t need the excuse of having a child to read them to – as with many picture books you can read them for your own pleasure.
Jeannie Baker’sCircle, for example, is about the wonder of the bartailed godwit’s journey from Alaska to Australia and New Zealand – the longest unbroken migration of any bird. Baker visited many of the locations along the way such as Alaska and China to select fabric, sand, vegetation and other unique materials to use in her beautiful mixed media collages. The book gently, yet compellingly, demonstrates how treatment of our own environment has far reaching effects on the lives of other living things both near and far.
Shaun Tan’sThe Lost Thing is another book that appeals to many age groups. I recently visited the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery to see the exhibition Shaun Tan: The Art of Story. Discovering The Lost Thing. Book to Film. It is on there until August 18th, 2016. Tan is justifiably thought of as one of Australia’s foremost picture book creators. You can see the Oscar winning animated film version of this book here. [You have to watch a rather long advertisement first unfortunately!]
Look at the cover of the book, The Lost Thing. What do you see at first glance? Maybe you notice the book is/ is going to be a story set in a city – not quite an ordinary city but a familiar, recognisable city nonetheless. You may also assume/recognise the lost thing is something rather strange or unusual. Is that large reddish thing with the tentacles the ‘thing’? What can it be? Or you might have a very different set of responses when you look at this cover.
Now, I thought we might try an experiment. It isn’t a competition and I don’t think it matters if you are coming to this book for the first time or already know it well. But I really would love to hear about what you see and how you interpret the words and images on the cover when you look more closely at it. [You might prefer to google Shaun Tan’s book to find a larger, clearer image of the cover than the one provided here.]
Take some time to explore this – jot down some of your thoughts and ideas, as few or many as you like, and post them to the blog (or to me if you’d rather and I’ll report them back anonymously) so we can all see what others see! You might like to ask a child to do the same thing or report on their thoughts.
If you haven’t come across Tan’s work before you might also look out for The Red Tree, a book that always pulls at my heartstrings, or The Arrival, a story of immigration told in a series of wordless images.
Catherine Keenan, the executive director of the Sydney Story Factory and the 2016 Australian of the year Local Hero, is our guest blogger today. Welcome Cath and congratulations on your well deserved award.
In the nearly four years since the Sydney Story Factory opened in Redfern, we’ve taken over 8,000 enrolments from young people aged 7 to 17. We offer them free creative writing and storytelling programs and they have surprised us with everything from poems about robot birds to ghost stories, a pantomime, food reviews, newspapers and podcasts. You can read some of their wonderful stories here.
Most of these young people are marginalised in some way. Around one quarter of our students are Indigenous and just under half are from non-English speaking backgrounds, particularly refugees and asylum seekers. All our programs – whether they’re a one-off two-hour workshop or a term-long program in a school – end in a publication. This might be an animation recorded on a DVD, or a beautifully illustrated book: either way, it’s something the students can take home and proudly show their family. There is nothing like the smile that spreads across the face of an eight-year-old when they hold that publication in their hands. Especially if that child normally struggles with literacy, as many of our students do.
Cath and William at the Story Factory
The thing that makes our workshops different – and makes writing at the Sydney Story Factory different from writing at school – is that our classes are run with volunteers. We have a fantastic staff of expert writers and teachers, and they plan and lead every workshop. But within each workshop, we may have, say, 20 students and 10 volunteers who work with those students one-on-one to support them as they write. The volunteer’s job is to say to the student: “That’s a great idea! Tell me more.” Writing is hard for everyone, whether you’re 7 or 70, and the volunteer is there to help when the student gets stuck. They ask questions and throw ideas around, and gently get the student going again. The volunteers don’t need to be experts in writing, and they don’t need to be teachers (though some of our best volunteers are retired teachers). They just need to be genuinely interested in the children they’re working with. You cannot over-estimate the power of having an adult, who’s not a family member and not a teacher, genuinely engaged with what a child thinks. You can almost see them stand a little bit taller.
There’s one boy I can think of – let’s call him John – whose mum almost literally dragged him through the door when we opened. He hated writing. He had just graduated from a remedial reading program and he would lie over two stools, facing the other way, yelling out “BORING!”
But our volunteers persevered. They didn’t treat him as a kid who was bad at writing; they were relentlessly curious to find out how he was going to finish his story and what would happen next. And very slowly, despite his best efforts, John’s ideas came. When he threw one out, our volunteer would grab it and say: ‘Yes. And? Then he’d have another idea and they’d run with that too. ‘Yes. And?’ At the end of that first course, which we ran in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, he’d worked with a small group to produce a short stop-motion animated film which was screened at the MCA for parents and friends who clapped and cheered.
Naturally, John still told us he hated the course. But he came back the next term. And the next. And the next. Nearly four years later he’s still coming. In fact, he’s enrolled in our longest ever course, a year-long program to write a novella of up to 30,000 words. He’s a very different boy from the one who first walked through our door. He’s doing better at school, and he’s far more confident as a person. When younger kids come into the Story Factory, he welcomes them and shows them around. We don’t claim credit for all of that, of course, but some part of it is because he has become something he never thought he would be: a writer.
Back in 2011, it seemed a risky decision to leave my job as a journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald to run the Sydney Story Factory. I would never have done it without the tireless and self-effacing support of my co-founder and Herald colleague, Tim Dick. But every time I see John, every time I see that light go on in a child’s eye when they understand the power and joy of words, I know I made the right decision.
For more information, go to http://www.sydneystoryfactory.org.au/. We’re always looking for more volunteers. If you’d like to volunteer, please go to http://www.sydneystoryfactory.org.au/about-volunteering/.
Children’s learning patterns can seem quite mysterious to an adult. The meanings they take from stories, for example, can be different from the meanings we think they take. In an earlier post I described how children need quite some time to work out what is real and what isn’t; and to come to understand the conventions of form and illustration in picture books – all processes which affect how they construct meaning.
Here are some further things to note:
A child’s logic may not seem logical to an adult. For example: A child might ask the following slightly off-track questions during a reading of The Three Little Pigs:
The Three Little Pigs
Why don’t animals eat themselves?
Why don’t wolves blow people’s houses down?
Do pigs wear hats?
Can pigs walk?
The adult sees these questions as irrelevant to the story being read. But the child has to work through many different connections between ideas and how things work in the world before they come to a similar kind of understanding. Their ‘own’ logic is very precious because it is based on seeing the world through new eyes.
What should you do? Should you interrupt your reading so that the thread of the story is lost and try to answer the questions asked as best you can? I think so. If the child’s mind is actively seeking answers then they really need to know what those answers are.
Of course, some children get so caught up with the questions that you never get back to the story. Maybe if this happens you can suggest you have a turn of just listening to the story. But on the whole questions shouldn’t be discouraged – it means the child is learning to think independently.
Children do not have an automatic understanding of idioms, homonyms and word play. Language has many encoded mysteries which adults understand without consciously thinking about them.
For example, a simple word can cause confusion to a child because it has more than one meaning. I recall the word ‘feet’ causing this problem for my daughter when we were reading Winnie-the-Pooh: ‘Oh, help!’ said Pooh, as he dropped ten feet to the branch below him.’
From Winnie-the-Pooh
But in the picture, as Juliet pointed out, Pooh only drops two feet, not ten! She was convinced the author had got it wrong. This kind of confusion is also caused with idioms.
What should you do? It is probably better to talk about these concepts outside of reading time. You could play word games to help this kind of understanding. Then when they do cause confusion in a reading it will be easier to explain what is meant.
Progress in a child’s learning is not continuously forward and may seem to get ‘stuck’ at times. A common learning pattern for a child is to take a step forward, then a step backward, pause there for a time, then move forward again.
Sometimes, a story a child seemed to understand suddenly raises questions from them suggesting they’ve missed the point entirely. There can be many reasons for this but one is that they become temporarily obsessed with something – not necessarily for reasons we understand. Subjects that regularly come under children’s scrutiny in this way include hands; feet; fathers; mothers; who/what looks after who/what; stealing; eating animals; death; and what’s real or pretend. A child will endlessly test out what can be known about their current fascination – they relate it to everything else – both successfully and unsuccessfully, they imitate it, and they see connections that may or may not be there.
What should you do? Understanding that there are common, seemingly irregular, learning patterns that most children work through means there’s no need to feel anxious when a child seems to ‘go backwards’. It is a part of their learning even though it looks as if it’s the opposite!
Mr Rabbit and the Lovely Present
Children build on what they know of the world by relating it to their books and their books gain in meanings as they learn more about the world.
This is a reciprocal process which reinforces understanding of a whole range of things. In other words, the books you read to children aren’t only offering them the pleasure of story and enrichment for the imagination. They also help build and consolidate ways of understanding and knowing.
What should you do? You can look out for books that might be helpful for situations relevant to your child. There is almost certainly a book that explores every new situation a child will face such as their ‘first time’ experiences – the dentist, the doctor, kindergarten, school – the death of a pet, the birth of a baby brother or sister and so on. It is best though to try to choose well written books that achieve their purpose in imaginative ways as books of this kind can be of poor quality. Do you have any recommendations?
The Children’s Book Council of Australia has announced their short listfor the book of the year in various categories for 2016.
There are some wonderful choices in each category. You could encourage your children, grandchildren or class to read books from the shortlist and make their own predictions as to which book deserve to win. I’d love to report any comments children might have about any books on the short list.
The winners are announced in August.
Categories include:
Early childhood,
Younger readers
Older readers
Information books
Picture book of the year
(You will notice that Aaron Blabey made it into the Early childhood category with Piranhas don’t eat bananas.)
I had a very nice surprise this week when Zoe’s mum posted a video of her reading my I Like Poems book on facebook. The best thing was that Zoe said the poem ‘Counting’ was ‘perfect’ for her as she is eight and is in the soccer team. Thanks Zoe!
Has anyone tried to read The Book with no Pictures by B.J. Novak to their children? It came out at the end of 2014 but I hadn’t come across it. I was intrigued by the title and got it from the library this week. I decided it might work on a parent child basis but I don’t think it would work with my Kindy class.
Then I found this Youtube of a teacher in America reading it to her class. The children seem to be enjoying it but I’m still not convinced I want to try it. What do you think?
Recently I sent a few of my books including these to a friend for her children, a girl aged 10 and a boy aged 11. I imagined she’d give these two books to her daughter, but a message came back that she was reading them with her son. Some good parenting going on there!
The printed title. Letters of uneven sizes and in a mixture of upper and lower case with the almost childish printing of the author’s name give the title a friendly, unconventional feeling. The word Lost stands out a bit because of its rich deep reddish colour. This suggests lostness is likely to be the focus of the story.
I Spy with my little Eye by Edward Gibbs. This book gives children the chance to guess which animal is on the other side of the spyglass. They get a hint because they can see part of it. It doesn’t seem to matter when they know the answers – they just love the repetition and the chance to call out the answer again and again. A good little twist in the ending as well.
Jeannie Baker’s Circle, for example, is about the wonder of the bartailed godwit’s journey from Alaska to Australia and New Zealand – the longest unbroken migration of any bird. Baker visited many of the locations along the way such as Alaska and China to select fabric, sand, vegetation and other unique materials to use in her beautiful mixed media collages. The book gently, yet compellingly, demonstrates how treatment of our own environment has far reaching effects on the lives of other living things both near and far.
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