A Portrait of Biodiversity in Children’s Trade Books

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eunice Sousa ◽  
Victor Quintino ◽  
José Teixeira ◽  
Ana Maria Rodrigues
Keyword(s):  
Public Perception ◽  
Companion Animals ◽  
Trade Books ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Domesticated Animals ◽  
The Public ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Global Biodiversity ◽  
Children's Attitudes

Indirect experiences are important in the public perception of nature and may influence attitudes towards conservation. Biodiversity and the environment are frequently presented in children’s books and promote children’s attitudes and emotions about biodiversity. We examined how biodiversity was portrayed in 164 books directed at six- to eight-year-old children. Living beings and habitats were found in 98% and 80% of the books, respectively, and included 441 different organisms in a total of 21,786 occurrences. The living beings in the books weren’t representative of the global biodiversity and were dominated by few iconic nonhuman organisms, mostly mammals, especially companion animals or other domesticated animals. The representations were strongly biased towards anthropomorphization of nonhuman animals who inhabited limited common habitats. This may contribute to the idea that all biodiversity lives in forests and humanized habitats, and is limited to nonhuman animals under human mastery or to few inaccessible megafauna.

Using Children's Books to Teach Mathematical Concepts

1981 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-15
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Smith ◽  
Karla Hawkins Wendelin
Keyword(s):  
Public Library ◽  
Primary Grades ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Mathematical Concepts ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Center ◽  
Mathematics Program ◽  
Special Expertise ◽  
Traditional Mathematics

Children's books can be an enjoyable way for children to learn mathematics in the primary grades. Books can serve as a supplement to the traditional mathematics materials and are useful with individuals and with groups. They are relatively easy to obtain, from the school media center or from the public library, and require no special expertise for use. The purpose of this article is to suggest specific books and to discuss bow they may be used in the mathematics program.

The Multicultural Curriculum and Children's Books of Jewish Interest in the Public School

1994 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-103
Author(s):  
Sylvia Firschein
Keyword(s):  
Public School ◽  
Picture Books ◽  
Classification Scheme ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Multicultural Curriculum ◽  
The Public ◽  
Jewish Children ◽  
Second Category

Books of Jewish interest in the public school are of two kinds. They may be informational, nonfiction works, generally classified in the religion section of the library's classification scheme. Such works are useful for those who are studying about Judaism and for those Jewish children in the school who need to see themselves reflected in the collection. Works in the second category, picture books and fiction, must be chosen for their universal value. The stories must appeal to all children, regardless of race or religion. Any child must be able to identify with the characters and incidentally learn something about Judaism.

scholarly journals Turn Trash into Treasure Recycling Children's Books

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Lin ◽  
Jin-Wan Tu
Keyword(s):  
Public Libraries ◽  
Spiritual Healing ◽  
School Libraries ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Reconstruction Process ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Us ◽  
Cooperative Process ◽  
Careful Handling

Children’s books disposed from the libraries can be trash, but in great varieties, once they are recycled properly, they will be treasure. There are thousands of children’s books disposed from the public libraries in the US due to different kind of reasons, through these years with careful handling, they become useful collections for the children of countries, where English is a major foreign language. They also have become valuable learning materials in schools and in the public libraries in Taiwan.In 1999, an earthquake stroke Taiwan and caused severe damages in the Central part of Taiwan. Many schools suffered from the damages. This tragedy brought in much concerns and donations from all over the world. North America Taiwan Women Association (NATWA) visited the damaged area and found that school libraries were in extreme need of help. In addition to monetary donation, NATWA realized the spiritual healing is as important as reconstruction process, therefore in 2004 NATWA launched “Turn Trash into Treasure Recycling Children’s Books” program mainly collecting off-shelf children’s books from American public libraries and shipped books to Taiwan, where the books are mostly in need. Geographically the recycling children’s books are mostly collected from about 45 public libraries in the Northern New Jersey area.This paper presents how the project was initiated and promoted, so as programs were designed to make maximum utilization of the recycled children’s books. Summarize statistical status of the project as well as cooperative process during the past four years.

Pets and Domesticated Animals in the Atlantic World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abel Alves
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Companion Animals ◽  
Social Standing ◽  
Domesticated Animals ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
The Status ◽  
Human Perceptions ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Black Beauty

While some might think that the study of pets and domesticated animals in the Atlantic world is a relatively recent phenomenon, there were a few pioneering efforts prior to the discipline-defining work of Alfred W. Crosby Jr., William Cronon, Harriet Ritvo, and Keith Thomas. Today, under the influence of individuals like Virginia deJohn Anderson and Erica Fudge, the field is expanding through a willingness to study the agency of nonhuman animals and the relationships that were formed between them and humans of different ethnicities and estates. In the spirit of James Serpell’s call to seek out instances of pet-keeping beyond the 19th-century European bourgeoisie, there is also a focus on the roles and attitudes of Africans and Amerindians in the development of an Atlantic matrix of traditions regarding pet-keeping and domestication. Evidence is mounting that behaviors we associate with pet-keeping today were present from 1492 on, and were not only displayed in the homes of members of the elite. While the comfort and longevity of companion animals might very well have been determined by the status of their humans, the concern demonstrated by humans of lower economic and social standing for companion animals has been found in the archives and early printed works by scholars like Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Marcy Norton. As with other aspects of this growing line of research, more remains to be done. In any new field or subdiscipline, terminology and periodization remain in flux. However, regular interactions in an Atlantic world certainly only began with Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, while the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, both in the 1870s, marked a victory for what had been two human perceptions of other animals that may have always been there, but that were frequently muted: that humans and other animals share the same feelings and similar methods of communication in their common sentience, and that the cruel use of, at the very least, domesticated animals is morally reprehensible and wrong. As much as our interactions with our pets and domesticated animals have shaped them, they have also shaped us in the Atlantic world and, indeed, globally.

Cultivating Ecological Generosity and Sustainability in Elementary Youth and Student Teachers via Children's Books

2019 ◽  
pp. 284-300
Author(s):  
Laura B. Liu
Keyword(s):  
Elementary Schools ◽  
Teacher Candidates ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Ecological Diversity ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
New School ◽  
The Public ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
Civic Science

Teacher candidates enrolled in a Civic Science for Elementary Schools course at a public university in a Midwestern state developed children's books on ecological diversity and sustainability. The children's books were analyzed qualitatively using constant comparative analyses that involved analyzing each book's images and text for evidence of key themes. Analyses demonstrated children's book creation as an instructional pedagogy and ecological diversity and sustainability as curricular content powerful to enhance ENL student engagement, identification, and learning in a new cultural, linguistic, and ecological setting. Book creation involves narrative and visual explanation of key concepts accessible to ENL learners. Ecological diversity and sustainability are values shared across regions and can enhance ENL student identification with a new school context, while valuing their knowledge funds. The public library emerged as a supportive glocal civic space to build pedagogical bridges among teacher candidates, elementary schools, and the shared community resource of children's books.

Links to Literature: An Old Tale with a New Turn-and Flip and Slide

1999 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-90
Author(s):  
Pat Margerm
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Trade Books ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books

In How to Use Children's Literature to Teach Mathematics, Welchman-Tischler (1997, 1–2) makes the following observation, “Some [children's books] are explicitly about mathematics, for example, counting books, books about shapes, and a variety of trade books that aim to teach specific mathematics concepts. Children can learn about mathematics directly from these books…. Other children's books involve mathematics in more subtle ways. They might not be called ‘math books’ by teachers or students, yet they suggest rich possibilities for extended mathematical investigations…. [A]lmost all stand on their own as good books….“

‘Here in India’: Nineteenth-Century British Women Navigating their Position in the Empire through Children's Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185
Author(s):  
Jesse Aberbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Infants And Children ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Maternal Roles ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
And Control ◽  
Botanical Study

This article considers how the children's books written by two nineteenth-century female writers, Eliza Tabor and Mary Martha Sherwood, when they accompanied their husbands to India, enabled them to navigate this new environment and their position as respectable middle-class women while revealing how India was deemed a place where British childhood was impossible. Just as many women took up botanical study to legitimise their ‘otherwise transgressive presence in imperial spaces’ (McEwan 219), writing for children enabled others to engage with the masculine world of travelling and earning money without compromising their femininity. Addressing their work to children also seems to have helped both writers to deal with the absence of their own children: the Indian climate made it impossibly challenging for most British infants and children. In this way their writing gives expression to what might be termed a crisis of imperial motherhood. Underlying the texts is an anxiety relating to British settlement and an attempt to comprehend and control a place that threatened their maternal roles.

The Adult as Foe or Friend?: Childism in Guus Kuijer's Criticism and Fiction

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Joosen
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Memorial Award ◽  
Adult Reader ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Selection Of

Compared to the attention that children's literature scholars have paid to the construction of childhood in children's literature and the role of adults as authors, mediators and readers of children's books, few researchers have made a systematic study of adults as characters in children's books. This article analyses the construction of adulthood in a selection of texts by the Dutch author and Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner Guus Kuijer and connects them with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent concept of ‘childism’ – a form of prejudice targeted against children. Whereas Kuijer published a severe critique of adulthood in Het geminachte kind [The despised child] (1980), in his literary works he explores a variety of positions that adults can take towards children, with varying degrees of childist features. Such a systematic and comparative analysis of the way grown-ups are characterised in children's texts helps to shed light on a didactic potential that materialises in different adult subject positions. After all, not only literary and artistic aspects of children's literature may be aimed at the adult reader (as well as the child), but also the didactic aspect of children's books can cross over between different age groups.

Life in the Open with Charles Frederick Holder

2014 ◽  
Vol 96 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-221
Author(s):  
Jane Apostol
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Sport Fishing ◽  
Prolific Author ◽  
Natural Scientist ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Santa Catalina Island

Natural scientist Charles Frederick Holder settled in Pasadena in 1885. As a prolific author, lecturer, and editor, Holder was a key promoter of the region, sport fishing, and natural science. He wrote popular children’s books as well. He is also remembered as an influential figure in education and the arts and as a founder of the Tuna Club on Santa Catalina Island and the Valley Hunt Club in Pasadena and its Tournament of Roses.

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