Dr. Seuss is a genre-breaker
I decided to sort the Kinglet's bookshelf into types of books - as opposed to size, like it always has been - so we could start addressing some of the talking-points in reading/literacy educational standards... for example, "this is a picture book, this is fiction, this is non-fiction, this is a poem..."
I want to be able to tell the Kinglet, "Go to your bookshelf and pick four story books to read during your reading hour". Grouped as they used to be, he might well grab a joke book, a book on dinosaurs, Go Do Go and The Phantom Tollbooth, which are entirely different in terms of suitability for the task and for his reading level.
Non-fiction isn't hard to separate out, but I'm finding it not all that easy to tease out categories of fiction, or even fiction from poetry (I'm looking at YOU, Dr. Seuss).
I'm guessing anyone who has worked in libraries or dealt at all with children's literature would be like, "well, duh, Lady". But in my own defense, I don't think the divisions were so clear-cut when I was a young reader (in fact I know they weren't, because we have a stack of books from the late 70s and early 80s that belonged to the God-King, obviously aimed at children but so NOT as spoon-feedable as what is marketed as literature now).
Plus, I had it in my mind that children's literature is largely divided into three categories - picture books, mid-grade, and YA - with subclasses along the way, because those are the keywords the writers and the agents and the editors in the industry seem to throw around. But there are chapter books that are extremely simple and picture books that are dense and use big words. Trying to divvy them up in terms that are useful to my son, an advanced reader, made my brain hurt a little. When I flip through a book and judge it "easy" for the Kinglet, where does it go?
Anyway, I ended up with sections that I think will be useful for us, for now, even though I've got overlap like Frog and Toad in the same section with Lemony Snickett. It'll do. But I realize now that my child is growing up and moving through the landscape of children's literature, I'm getting a different understanding of it - and wondering how this applies to my own attempts at writing for children. Are my picturebooks (1000 words or less and worded so as to beg an illustrator's enhancement) actually "illustrated storybooks" - or some other in-between category that I'm not using fluently?
It's food for thought.
I want to be able to tell the Kinglet, "Go to your bookshelf and pick four story books to read during your reading hour". Grouped as they used to be, he might well grab a joke book, a book on dinosaurs, Go Do Go and The Phantom Tollbooth, which are entirely different in terms of suitability for the task and for his reading level.
Non-fiction isn't hard to separate out, but I'm finding it not all that easy to tease out categories of fiction, or even fiction from poetry (I'm looking at YOU, Dr. Seuss).
I'm guessing anyone who has worked in libraries or dealt at all with children's literature would be like, "well, duh, Lady". But in my own defense, I don't think the divisions were so clear-cut when I was a young reader (in fact I know they weren't, because we have a stack of books from the late 70s and early 80s that belonged to the God-King, obviously aimed at children but so NOT as spoon-feedable as what is marketed as literature now).
Plus, I had it in my mind that children's literature is largely divided into three categories - picture books, mid-grade, and YA - with subclasses along the way, because those are the keywords the writers and the agents and the editors in the industry seem to throw around. But there are chapter books that are extremely simple and picture books that are dense and use big words. Trying to divvy them up in terms that are useful to my son, an advanced reader, made my brain hurt a little. When I flip through a book and judge it "easy" for the Kinglet, where does it go?
Anyway, I ended up with sections that I think will be useful for us, for now, even though I've got overlap like Frog and Toad in the same section with Lemony Snickett. It'll do. But I realize now that my child is growing up and moving through the landscape of children's literature, I'm getting a different understanding of it - and wondering how this applies to my own attempts at writing for children. Are my picturebooks (1000 words or less and worded so as to beg an illustrator's enhancement) actually "illustrated storybooks" - or some other in-between category that I'm not using fluently?
It's food for thought.