What is the rising action of the story everyday use

Assignment

4.2 What Is a Story?

Babe is a clear example of a well-made story: It centers on a character readers care about, places that character in a clearly identifiable conflict, provides him with helpers and detractors, builds suspense, and releases that suspense in a triumphant moment that resolves the conflict. It also features an uplifting moral that corresponds to several of the developmental projects of early childhood: the need to establish trust in the world, and the need to establish autonomy, take initiative, and assert yourself. It also contains themes that are important to older children as they develop and encounter more complex problems and situations that cause them to question what makes life meaningful. It offers a very reassuring message about our ability to triumph over death and meaninglessness through exercising our particular gifts.

Every day, stuff happens. Just like adults, children have desires and needs, and we all try to fulfill them: We eat, we sleep, we love, we hate, we complain, we worship, we work, we play, we cry, we laugh. Through it all, we try to make sense of the things that happen. Throughout human history, the most persistent way we have tried to put things into some meaningful order or context is through stories. As individuals and in societies, we want to be able to predict future events, avoid pain and unpleasantness, and solve problems. We want to remember things that happen and people we have lost. We want to know why things happen and why the world works the way it does. We want to explain ourselves. We want to imagine other worlds and possible futures. We want to pass on our values and our knowledge to future generations.

These projects are no less urgent for young children than they are for adults. As I have noted throughout this book, we have to remember how new the world is for children and how they must work to make sense of it. Gordon Wells, a professor who specializes in language and learning, argues that "storying" is how we do that:

Rarely, if ever, do we have all the necessary visual or other sensory information to decide unambiguously what it is we are seeing, hearing, or touching. Instead we draw on our mental model of the world to construct a story that would be plausible in the context and use that to check the data of sense against the predictions that the story makes possible. (1986, p. 195)

Wells explains that the process works like this: From infancy, children construct mental models based on what happens repeatedly in their environments. They use these mental models to put things into categories of experience, like things that live in my crib, or what Mommy does when we are getting ready to go outside. When they encounter a new experience, they don't approach it with an "open mind," that is, with no preset understandings. Rather they put things into their already established mental categories (their stories) and then see if their experience fits within those stories. When it doesn't, they make adjustments to their mental models to accommodate the new experiences.

We help in that process of meaning making by passing along stories that explain the world to children. Our stories put experiences into broader contexts, contexts that children may not have imagined before. Our stories also have a more defined shape than simple organizational categories. Instead, the stories we share have temporal sequences—beginnings, middles, and ends—and link up causes and effects. By telling a story, we can help children look at an event or relationship from the outside and see how their behavior might have led to a specific outcome or how their relationships fit into a pattern that they may or may not like. Stories have a shaped, ordered, finished quality that tames an experience by making it smaller so that we can see it whole; this makes the world a more manageable place because it divides it up into chunks of time and experience, much like chapters or episodes. On the other hand, stories can help us imagine alternatives to everyday life, and this makes the world bigger, gives it more possibilities.

Children are not born storytellers; this is one more thing they need to learn in order to become fully human. Fortunate children grow up surrounded by storytellers, though. Just like we provide special spaces for their bodies to help them make the physical world more manageable, we provide stories to furnish and shape their minds. Parents, teachers, siblings, friends all tell stories, and children often learn the form of stories before they learn the meanings behind them. They learn these patterns from the music of our voices—our storytelling voices are different from our everyday voices, more intentionally rhythmic, more animated—and also from the ritualized use of specific words and phrases to begin and end stories that children learn through repetition. For instance, they know how a story begins: "Once upon a time . . ." "Long ago and far away . . ." "I remember when . . ." "That reminds me of the time. . . ." They know how a story ends: "They all lived happily ever after," "That's why things are the way they are today," "If they haven't died, they are living still." But what happens in between?

Plot and Conflict

The plot of a story is the sequence of events that happen in a story. In order for a story to be successful, the plot has to have an identifiable shape. Most stories start with some form of exposition so that readers know something about where the story begins. That is, we need to be grounded somehow. Maybe we are introduced to a character or the setting. Very soon, however, we need a narrative hook. Something has to happen to get us interested, like Babe's being taken out of the piggery or Max being sent to his room in Where the Wild Things Are. Stories that spend too much time establishing the world or the characters without anything actually happening are generally not successful as children's books, but stories that start without giving us any context can be confusing. Striking a balance is key.

The first line of Charlotte's Web, for instance, is a super example of a narrative hook. "'Where's Papa going with that ax?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast" (White, 1952, p. 1). Excellent question, and one that draws reader's attention immediately, as well as introducing the character and the situation. In his original plan for the book, E. B. White thought of starting with a description of the barn that Wilbur eventually goes to live in (Neumeyer 1994, p. xxix). If it had, we wouldn't have had the sense of urgency that fills the entire first chapter until Fern manages to convince her father not to kill the runt pig who eventually becomes known as Wilbur.

Usually, the narrative hook introduces the problem, or conflict, of the story. Here again, conflict is as important as action in a story, especially for children. Very young children may tolerate the narration of a chicken's walk around a farmyard where nothing goes wrong if the book has interesting pictures to look at, but a story without a conflict isn't really a story at all—it's a vignette, or a sketch. That is, if Rosie's Walk (Hutchins, 1971) did not have the pictures of the fox's unsuccessful attempts to capture her, it would be a very dull story indeed. Even Kevin Henkes's Little White Rabbit (2011), which is a very quiet story about a rabbit who imagines what it would be like to be different things—green like the grass or tall like the fir trees—has a moment of conflict and excitement when the rabbit comes unexpectedly upon a cat. A story needs a problem to solve.

Plot Categories by Content

There are multiple models for how plots work. Some are content-based, arguing that there are certain generic plots that storytellers use over and over again as a repertoire (Nodelman & Reimer, 2002). The number and content of these plots varies, and there is much controversy over the theory, but the idea helps us think about the structural similarities of the kinds of plots we like and the kinds that children will like. Christopher Booker, a British journalist (2005), for instance, has made an exhaustive study of what many writers agree are seven basic plots:

Overcoming the Monster: The hero learns of a great evil and sets out to destroy it.

Rags to Riches: Surrounded by dark forces who wish him or her ill, the protagonist eventually overcomes the evil and gets riches, a kingdom, and a mate.

The Quest: The hero learns of a great boon and sets out to find it.

Voyage and Return: The protagonist journeys to a far-off land where he or she triumphs and returns home with a more mature outlook.

Comedy: The hero and heroine are being kept apart by some dark force. The dark force is defeated and the couple reunites.

Tragedy: The protagonist is really a villain, and the story involves his or her spiral into destruction.

Rebirth: Follows the same trajectory as a tragedy, except the hero repents and is rehabilitated.

Some plots of children's books fit neatly into one of these categories. For instance, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum, 1900), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865), and Peter Pan (Barrie, 1911) are all Voyage and Return stories. In fact, children's literature scholars Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer (2002) argue that the Voyage and Return plot is the most prevalent of all the plots in children's literature. However, other plots are evident. Traditional versions of "The Three Little Pigs" are clearly Overcoming the Monster stories. Where the Wild Things Are also fits that category, as Max overcomes his own inner monsters.

Some stories combine elements of several of the basic plots. For instance, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" combines elements of Rags to Riches with elements of Comedy. Babe has elements of the Quest, but also of Comedy, if we consider that Rex and Fly are driven apart by Rex's jealousy and reunited by Babe's victory. The Tragedy plot is the one least likely to be found in children's stories, as it is rare to present a protagonist who is really a villain to children without rehabilitating him at some point. The Abominable Snowman in the Rankin/Bass production of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Dr. Seuss's Grinch (1957) are both cases in point; although they start the story as villains, they are reformed by the end.

In addition to content categories, plots come in different shapes or structures. Like the content categories, sometimes these structures overlap.

Cumulative Plots

Oftentimes, the problem shapes the plot. For instance, the problem could be one that leads to other problems, which results in a cumulative plot structure. For instance, in the book based on the folk song There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (Taback, 1997), the woman swallows one animal after another to chase the previous one. Suspense mounts as each animal gets bigger until the inevitable happens: The old woman swallows a horse and dies. A similar cumulative structure can be found in the traditional story The Mitten (adapted and illustrated by Jan Brett, 1989), where a boy loses his mitten in the forest and animals take up residence in it for warmth. The first animal is always very small—a mouse in some versions, a mole in others, but the animals get gradually bigger until the mitten rips. These sorts of stories play on the concepts of repetition and elaboration, and they often suggest a theme of how small problems grow into big ones if they aren't solved. Generally, they are funny, and they are great to use for drama activities with children acting out the cumulative plot. They also promote confident reading through the use of repetition. The following are stories with cumulative plots:

Stories With Cumulative Plots

Arnold, K. Knock, Knock, Termok! (1995)

Bishop, Gavin. Chicken Licken. (1987)

Brett, Jan. The Mitten. (1989)

Brisson, Pat. Benny's Pennies. (1995)

Burningham, John, Mr. Grumpy's Outing. (1995)

Carle, Eric. Today is Monday. (1993)

Cole, Henry. Jack's Garden. (1997)

Cole, Joanna. It's Too Noisy. (1992)

Donaldson, Julia. A Squash and a Squeeze. (2005)

Dunbar, Joyce. Seven Sillies. (1999)

Hutchins, Pat. Little Pink Pig. (2000)

Lobel, Arnold. The Rose in My Garden. (1993)

Neitzel, Shirley, and Parker, Nancy Winslow. The Bag I'm Taking to Grandma's. (1998)

Sloat, Teri, and Bernard, Nadine. The Thing That Bothered Farmer Brown. (2001)

Tolstoy, Alexei, and Goto, Scott. The Enormous Turnip. (2003)

Taback, Simms, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. (1997)

Waddell, Martin, and Barton, Jill. The Pig in the Pond. (1996)

West, Colin. "I Don't Care!" Said the Bear. (1997)

Wood, Audrey, and Wood, Don. King Bidgood's in the Bathtub. (1985)

Climactic Plots

Another way of organizing a plot centers on a conflict that leads to a climax or crisis—a moment where the tension breaks and the conflict is decided one way or the other. This is called a climactic plot structure (Figure 4.1). Instead of using repetition, the conflict escalates through some sort of rising action. Cumulative plots can build to climaxes, such as in The Mitten, when the mitten strains to bursting and all of the animals have to leave. However, they don't have to end in climaxes; their structures can simply build to happy chaos without tension. Nor does rising action have to be cumulative; complications in the rising action can be unrelated to each other, as they are in Babe. The difference is that in climactic structures, tension and suspense builds until it breaks. In Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1963), the height of the action is the wild rumpus in the land where the wild things are. It breaks the tension that has been building throughout the book and leads to the resolution. Following the climax, Max calls an end to the festivities and heads home.

Another book with a climactic plot structure is Kevin Henkes's Owen (1993). The establishing shot of Owen playing peacefully in his yard is immediately interrupted by the words on the first page, where the nosy neighbor, Mrs. Tweezers, tells Owen's parents that it is time for Owen to give up his blanket. That's the narrative hook that introduces the conflict. The rising action, or complications, involves Owen's parents trying various means suggested by Mrs. Tweezers to separate Owen from his blanket, but Owen always succeeds in thwarting their plans. Finally, though, the climax occurs when Owen's mother cuts his blanket into handkerchiefs. This solves the problem to everyone's satisfaction and thus leads to a happy resolution of the conflict.

A climactic plot is often pictured as a witch's hat. The flat brim of exposition takes off at the narrative hook up a steep slope of rising action, peaks at the climax, follows an equally long downward slope of falling action, and then levels off again in the resolution. This is a useful model for teaching story structure to children and for helping them develop their own stories when they begin to tell and write them. But most books, including children's books, are usually not that symmetrical. First, as noted earlier, children don't often have patience for too much exposition before the action starts. Likewise, once the problem is solved, the story is effectively over, so the falling action and resolution are often quite quick. But each of these elements is necessary in order for the story to feel whole and complete.

Episodic Plots

Books for emerging independent readers most often favor episodic plot structures (see Figure 4.2). Rather than track one conflict over the entire book, these books feature mini-climactic plots in each chapter. This is important for young children, because it builds on what they are already familiar with. New readers have learned to follow a climactic plot structure over a 32-page picturebook, but it would be daunting to jump right into a book that stretches the suspense out over a hundred pages. Children's brains have not yet sufficiently developed to process complex relationships of cause and effect, but if the consequences for an action are immediate and concrete, they get it.

Hence the authors of books like the Ramona, the Alvin Ho, and the Ivy and Bean series plot their books by creating short episodes that follow the basic pattern of exposition, narrative hook, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. However, the best authors guide their readers toward mastering a longer narrative by making each episode relate to a larger conflict that dominates the story. For instance, in Alvin Ho: Allergic to Dead Bodies, Funerals, and other Fatal Circumstances (Look, 2011), Alvin impetuously volunteers to accompany his grandfather to his grandfather's best friend's funeral. He regrets his offer, immediately. He is too scared to go and too scared to tell his grandfather that he's scared. Meanwhile, he is afraid that his grandfather will also die.

In addition to Alvin's immediate problem in this particular book, he suffers from a social anxiety disorder that renders him unable to talk at all in school. In one chapter, Alvin's fear of talking leads to a comical episode where his teachers misunderstand the situation and think his grandfather is actually dead. They orchestrate a memorial service that ends in chaos when Alvin's grandfather walks in the door. While the episode is very funny and self-contained, it relates to the larger problems of Alvin having to attend a funeral and his fears that his grandfather will die.

Types of Conflicts

The conflicts in children's books need to be centered on children's experiences, and they need to be problems that children can see an end to or at least be able to find a method of coping if the problem itself cannot be resolved. In traditional literary study, the core conflicts are categorized in terms of abstract struggles of a fictional character:

· character vs. character

· character vs. society

· character vs. nature

· character vs. self

· character vs. the supernatural

· character vs. technology or machines

Children's literature makes these basic sorts of conflicts relevant to children by relating them to common childhood experience.

Mastering fear of the dark, for instance, would be a character vs. self conflict, as would mastering one's angry impulses, as in Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry (2004). Books that focus on sibling rivalry can demonstrate a character vs. character or a character vs. self conflict, depending on whether the sibling is actively trying to thwart the main character or the main character is simply jealous of the new sibling's arrival.

As we noted previously, the main conflict in Babe is character vs. society, but we can also see character vs. technology, as both Farmer Hoggett and Ferdinand resist attempts at modernization, exemplified by the alarm clock and the fax machine. Paul Fleischman's Weslandia (2002) offers a firm example of character vs. society, as Wesley rejects the values of his peers and forms his own civilization. David Shannon's A Bad Case of Stripes (2007) offers a more complex example that combines character vs. the self with character vs. society. Camilla Cream desperately wants to fit in with her peers at first, so she denies her love of lima beans, but in the end she has to take a stand against her society in order to reclaim her sense of self.

Children's books that confront natural disasters and frightening weather events, such as Jonathan London's Hurricane! (1998), Darlene Bailey Beard's Twister (2003), and Karen Hesse's Come on, Rain! (1999) often treat the character's inner struggles with fear as much as they demonstrate a character vs. nature conflict. Chapter books suitable for read-alouds with third graders such as Jewell Parker Rhodes' Ninth Ward (2010) and Brenda Woods' Saint Louis Armstrong Beach (2011) help children understand both the emotional and the physical conflicts that emerge when characters are faced with the devastation nature can inflict on communities.

Identifying these types of conflicts is an activity that can help school-aged children (grades 1–3) analyze what is called story grammar, that is, all of the elements that go into a story and how they are arranged. For a way to introduce and teach this concept, see the Teaching Ideas at the end of this chapter. But just talking about the problem in the book will help them see how it might relate to their own experiences. Common problems in children's books are the same as common problems in children's lives: sibling rivalry, toilet teaching, giving up a beloved blanket or stuffed animal, losing a loved one, mastering negative emotions, learning a new skill, entering school, figuring out identity, and so forth.

Before reading Owen, for instance, you might ask students whether they have a blanket or a favorite stuffed animal that they couldn't bring to school with them. Talk a little bit about how they feel about the problem, and then read the story and ask what they think about Owen's parents' solution. Then read similarly themed books, such as Something From Nothing and Mo Willem's Knuffle Bunny (2004), and ask students to compare the books to each other and to their own experiences. Pay attention to the conflicts that children bring with them to school, the things they talk about that are bothering them, and find books to help them find solutions or at least solidarity in their conflict.

Character

As we noted in Chapter 1, characters in children's books are often iconic—that is, they are drawn as types so that children who don't look like them can relate to them anyway. The fewer details in a face, the more people the figure could possibly look like. The same concept can also be used in developing a character's personality.

Max, in Where the Wild Things Are, is a particular boy, but his face is drawn in such a way so that many children can relate to him; he is mostly defined by his expressions, which most children replicate. As a character, all we really know about him is that he has a mom and a dog, lives in a house where he has his own bedroom, likes to eat hot food, and has a vivid imagination. These scanty details enable Max to be a sort of "everychild," which is one of the reasons why his story remains popular nearly 50 years after it was published.

Peter in Ezra Jack Keats's The Snowy Day (1963, available to be read online at http://www.wegivebooks.org/books/the-snowy-day) functions similarly; his figure is depicted mostly as shape and color, with very few facial details except that he is clearly African American, and his character is developed by his actions. He is excited to see the snow, active and curious as he plays, realistic about his chances of playing with older boys, talkative with his mother, thoughtful in his bath, and naïve about the ability to keep a snowball in his pocket. These sorts of "universal" characters enable children to relate to their adventures rather than being distanced by details that make the characters into distinct children.

In early chapter books, characters are more fully developed in words, and less so through pictures. This is where all of their early training in multiliteracies becomes important to help them understand what they read. Here is how Annie Barrows (2006) describes her characters in Ivy and Bean:

Ivy sat nicely on her front steps. Bean zipped around her yard and yelled. Ivy had long, curly red hair pushed back with a sparkly headband. Bean's hair was black, and it only came to her chin because it got tangled if it was any longer. When Bean put on a headband, it fell off. Ivy wore a dress every day. Bean wore a dress when her mother made her. Ivy was always reading a big book. Bean never read big books. Reading made her jumpy. (pp. 8–9)

From these descriptions of what the characters wear and look like (visual), how they move (gestural), where they like to sit or play (spatial), and how they feel about reading (linguistic), readers have to make inferences about which girl they might like and which one is most like them. They plug these descriptions into mental models and start making predictions that carry them into the world of the story. The descriptions are general enough to allow them to make identifications, but specific enough for the readers to be able to tell which character is which and predict how they might respond to situations.

Protagonists, Antagonists, and Secondary Characters

The main character of a story is called the protagonist. Sometimes in stories with character vs. character conflict there is another character who acts as the antagonist, who creates the obstacles that keep the protagonist from getting what he or she wants. Depending on the conflict, however, there may not be a clear antagonist. Instead, there are usually secondary characters who help the main character or just fill out the character's world. Sometimes these secondary characters are there to provide humor; sometimes they help us get to know the main character.

Round and Flat Characters

Readers get to know characters by various means. We learn about them through the way they dress and hold themselves in the pictures, the way they talk, the way they treat other characters, and the way other characters treat them. Characters who have multiple traits and facets are called round characters, while characters who have only one characteristic are called flat characters.

Main characters are usually round, while antagonists are often flat, unless the author wants to solve the conflict by having the protagonist and antagonist become friends. In that case, the antagonist must have some good qualities to balance out the ones that caused the conflict. Otherwise, keeping the antagonist flat is a device authors use to keep the sides of the conflict simple: protagonist good, antagonist bad. For instance, in traditional versions of "The Three Little Pigs" (listen to a traditional version here), the characters are all flat. The brother who builds his house from bricks is the protagonist, and the wolf is the antagonist. The foolish brothers are secondary characters included in the story to teach a lesson. So when the wolf gobbles them up after blowing their houses down, his evil nature is conveyed without too much grief on the part of the audience. But in nontraditional versions where the wolf is supposed to be more sympathetic, such as the parody, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, by John Scieszka and Lane Smith (1996), the wolf is a round character, with fully developed reasons why his story has been misunderstood.

Dynamic and Static Characters

Another important quality to bear in mind while analyzing characters is whether or not they grow or change over the course of the story. Characters who grow by learning a lesson or mastering an emotion are called dynamic characters. Their growth is called the character arc. Characters who remain the same over the course of the story are called static characters. Winnie the Pooh and his friends are good examples of static characters. They don't grow or change over the course of their books, while Christopher Robin does; he learns new things and eventually leaves them to go to school, so he is a dynamic character.

This reflects A. A. Milne's ideology of childhood, which is obviously shared by many of us as evidenced by the lasting popularity of his books and characters: We like to think that childhood as an idea remains the same even if we ourselves grow out of it. For children, Pooh and the other animals help them negotiate that sense of change and growth by providing a stable, unchanging environment that will still be there if they need to come back to it. This is very similar to the conflict that is worked out over the course of the three Toy Story movies as well.

Different Characters for Different Reading Purposes

In judging quality in terms of characters, it is not necessarily true that books with round, dynamic characters are better than books that feature flat, static ones. If that were the case, we would be dismissing most folk literature as bad. But folk stories are very useful to developing readers in understanding their own character traits and conflicts, as well as what traits their culture values and devalues.

In other words, child readers don't necessarily need psychologically complex characters in order to develop more psychological complexity themselves. Here, as in most cases of evaluation, we need to think about the age of the child and what the story is useful for. Static, flat characters are often good for reading about when children are going through traumatic situations or changes themselves. Characters like Pooh, Brer Rabbit, Elephant and Piggie (Willems, 2007) and Bink and Gollie (DiCamillo, McGhee, and Fucile, 2010) are comforting because children know what to expect from them. However, when children are beginning to show signs of boredom within themselves, introducing books with round, dynamic characters such as Ramona or Ivy and Bean, can help them chart a path forward in their personal development.

Setting

When and where a book takes place is called its setting. Setting is often the most important way that an author establishes the mood or tone of the story. It also helps in the development of spatial literacy as readers observe characters interacting with their various environments.

Because children make sense of books by bringing their knowledge of the world into their reading and then adjusting their knowledge of the world through what they read, texts set in different places do a lot of cultural and personal work. They remind us, for instance, that children grow up in all sorts of settings and that an ideal childhood can be lived anywhere, if it even exists. Urban stories capture the attention of urban children by looking like the environments they see around them. Rural and suburban settings introduce different kinds of experiences. Through books, children can expand their understanding of the world no matter where they live.

Attending to setting from a comparative perspective helps foster a child's spatial literacy. For instance, comparing the world of the book with the world children live in helps them understand the special qualities of their own time and place. Focusing on pictorial details of books set in the past or elsewhere in the world and asking students to compare the clothing, housing, landscapes, and other setting indicators with their own environments will help them notice the unique features of their everyday surroundings, and understand that others in the world live and have lived differently.

The important thing for teachers is to make sure they choose books that present a variety of settings so that children's experiences can be both affirmed through similarities and expanded through differences.

Theme

The theme of a book is its main conceptual idea—the point it is trying to communicate. When grownups are asked what a children's book is about, they will most often state the theme, what the book seems to be about. For instance, they are likely to say that Dr. Seuss's The Lorax (1972) is about environmentalism and the dangers of deforestation and corporate irresponsibility. Children, however, think in terms of details. For them, The Lorax is about a grumpy little orange creature who keeps yelling at the guy who makes the thneeds. They might get the tone of the book as well by discussing the way the colors make them feel, the style of the pictures or the expressions of the characters, or the way the language works. The Lorax always looks sad or angry, and he often yells, so even though the book has comical-looking pictures, children will sense that this is not a funny book.

But it is important to remember that the subject of a book is not the same as the plot, and that the subject and plot are not the same as the theme. Each level of understanding represents a higher order of thinking and abstraction. In the case of the Lorax, the subject is a boy wanting to know why his town is so polluted. The plot tells the story of the Once-ler who came to town and harvested the Truffula trees to make thneeds, ignored the warnings of the Lorax, and destroyed the environment through his greed. The theme is that this sort of environmental destruction is caused by corporate greed and can be prevented or reversed if people pay attention to the damage they are causing. This is driven home by the Once-ler giving the boy the last Truffula seed to plant and nurture.

Moreover, there are implicit themes that emerge as well as explicit ones. The explicit theme of H. A. and Margret Rey's Curious George (1941), for instance, may well be that little monkeys are happiest in zoos (it is a product of its time, after all). But there are multiple implicit themes as well, depending on how you view the characters in the book. My students, for instance, often see the Man in the Yellow Hat as a neglectful parent who can't handle his child's mischief, so he sends him away. There are also implicit racist themes throughout the book communicated through the fact that George is from Africa and is surrounded by White people. Whenever he tries to act like them, he fails, and ultimately ends up incarcerated. The fun and adventures that Curious George has throughout the book may implicitly communicate the theme that bad behavior is worth the consequences, or the outrageous consequences of Curious George's actions may communicate to still others that curiosity is best curbed. Any of these themes is possible depending on the experiences and dispositions the reader brings to the text.

Given this potential confusion of thematic messages, it is tempting to say that the best way to evaluate a book based on its theme is to consider how clearly the theme is communicated. The problem here is that books for which the theme is more important than the entertainment can be preachy and boring. Look for books that entertain as they instruct. For instance, many of Dr. Seuss's books are very message-driven, but the messages are couched in interesting stories.

On the other hand, don't shy away from books whose themes are not immediately clear. Instead, talk with children about their experience of the book. Children as young as 4 or 5 can be engaged in discussion about the theme of a book if questions are scaffolded through the book's details. Ask them what they thought the book was about, what the main problem was, how it was solved, and whether they thought it was a good solution. Oftentimes, letting children respond to a book by drawing a picture or acting out a scene helps them communicate what they found was most important or confusing or interesting about a book. This will help them figure out what theme was most important to them and also help them develop the skill of responding to a book thoughtfully rather than hunting for an author's message.

Coats, K. (2013). Children’s literature & the developing reader [Electronic version]. Retrieved from https://content.ashford.edu/