Have you ever found yourself staring into the bookshelves of a bookstore wondering which book will be the best for your child? Choosing the right book for your child has always been a question many have pondered with. Often, we find ourselves in a bookstore, unsure of what to choose, and end up selecting a book based on its title, cover design, or one we’ve heard about.
But how do we know, that is indeed the best book for our child? Don’t worry, we have all been in this place. We can help you answer this question with a few simple steps. But before that, let us first dive into the different kinds of children’s books today. Let us take a small tour through the children’s books section of a library you just walked into.
You plan to buy the best possible books for your child. But how do you know you chose the best books for your child? Do colorful covers or pictures alone make a book good? Do the same selection rules apply to all children? First, let’s explore what we might find in this section of the library before discussing how to choose. After all, how can we select something without knowing our options? It’s like being asked to choose a cookie without seeing them—impossible, right? The same principle applies here.
What are some ways we can group children’s literature?
Many people have specialized in children’s literature, its types, and how to choose books for a child. For instance, Kathleen T Horning, former director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin is one such person, renowned for her understanding of children’s literature who also brings to the table her experience with children’s libraries among other things (“Harper Collins Publications”). Another group is the scholastic, which has divided children’s literature into groups based on their reading learning levels, and age (“Scholastic”). Confusing? Reading levels, how exactly do they connect age to reading levels? How are all these connected to children’s literature? Don’t worry. We will take slow steps. As of now, for ease of understanding, we will look at reading levels as just how easy or difficult the text comprehension is, although it is important to understand that it is more than just that. Have you noticed number 1,2,3 written on the front cover of your child’s book? That is the reading level. In most contexts as a child’s age increases, so does their reading level. That would mean, a child of KG1 would most probably be at a beginning level of reading. But this is not so in all contexts, and that is completely normal. We will discuss this in upcoming articles.
What are the types of children’s literature and how do they differ?
To begin with, Children’s literature can largely be divided into fiction and non-fiction. Within these categories, there are different types of books, that we will explore. Now to understand this better, let us get back to Kathleen.T.Horning and her classification of children’s literature.
She has written a book on children’s literature, and our article will mainly focus on this classification for now. She divided children’s literature into four larger groups (Horning, 2010). Any guesses as to what some of these might be?
You might have guessed picture books. Yes! You’re right. Picture books are the first category. Then comes Easy Reader books, then Transition Books, and last Children’s Novels.
Let’s look at what each of these are, or what they look like. But wait, before that, what makes these books so different from each other? Is it how they look? Or is it something else? Remember I mentioned some elements that influence how we should select a book? Remember reading about age and reading levels being an important factor while choosing books, along with that, we will look at text, and pictures, too. But this time we will see how to use these groups to differentiate one type of book from another. Another question to ask yourself would be, what does it mean to move from one category to another?
Does all this sound a little like Greek and Latin? Don’t worry, let’s look at each category, starting with picture books. What exactly are picture books? What do you think? Have you ever noticed those books where your child has to spend a lot of time looking at the pictures in detail and reading a few sentences? Those are picture books. This is the book you give your child when they start to read. This will allow them to spend more time with pictures understand the story without missing important information, and read the text. You can read these books aloud to your child too. There are some things you can focus on while reading to your child, like asking them to explain what they understand from pictures, asking questions encouraging them to predict what might happen next, and sharing their thoughts and opinions about the whole story or parts of the story.
Let’s begin with one of the most important questions, ‘What does it mean to move from one category to another’. Moving from one category to another would indicate your child’s familiarity with reading and comprehending text, along with the need for pictures increasing over time.
Picture Books:
As we discussed earlier, your child would most probably begin to read with picture books. Here, the child is expected to look at pictures and spend time understanding them along with reading text. Your child will take time to develop the skill of reading and comprehending text, as they will have to familiarize themselves with the symbols of each alphabet, the sounds they make when put together and what they mean. Pictures on the other hand do not have strict rules like this, making it easier for children to comprehend.
Colours, lines, contrast, shapes, dominance, and balance are the visual elements that are important in these books. But how exactly you ask? While an author writes a story for a picture book, they would want children to focus on specific objects or parts of pictures. That would mean, the artist might use colours, contrast between colours or objects, dominance of a colour, object or any other element in the page while drawing a picture. Sometimes the artist might also use elements like lines to visualise some concepts, for instance, a line showing a cat’s growth over time in Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats. Along with this, these books also use elements like questions, rhyme(language written in a pattern that uses repeated sounds), rhythm(text written in a pattern, while following a poetry format), repetition (repeating lines, and words at different intervals in a story), predictability(a language pattern that encourages children to predict what might happen next) and pace.
So if your child is only beginning to read, it is better to begin with picture books. Let them explore the pictures and text with all these elements.
Easy Reader Books:
Let’s say your child can easily read picture books and is ready to read books with more text, and words. In this context, the books chosen would have pictures, but the major focus would be on the text. These books have also been divided into three levels, with the first level having more pictures on each page with only around 5 words per line. The second level too has 5 words per line. However, the first level has fewer lines per page (2-7 lines per page) as opposed to the second level (14-15 lines per page). The third level has more words per line, than levels 1 and 2 (8 words per line), and almost the same amount of lines per page as level 2 (15 lines per page). While the first level has more sight words and one-syllable words, the second and third levels have more multi-syllable (a syllable is a unit of pronunciation) words along with more sight words (those words that are used frequently. Your child is expected to read these words by just looking at them without having to read each letter in the word and put them together to read each time). Do not worry, words like multi-syllable and sight words can be new to you, but you do not have to worry about that now. For now, you can go with the simplest explanation of the difficulty level of these books increasing from level 1 to 3. Another thing that you can notice is that the words per sentence, and words per page increase from levels 1 to 3 in these books.
This does seem like a lot to look at while choosing a book, but do not worry! Nobody expects you to know all this information by heart when you go to a bookstore with your child the next time. All you need to do is understand the different kinds of books in children’s literature, and how they’re different from each other.
Transition Books:
Once your child can easily read ‘Easy Reader level 3’ books and is ready to read books with more text, and words that are a little more difficult to comprehend, they can move on to books with more text, and stories divided into smaller chapters. These books are what we call transition books, or in other words, books that would help you transition smoothly to read children’s novels (books with longer stories, more pages and text). Up to this point, your child has been reading books, where the story is written in one flow from start to finish. That would mean once the story begins, it is written in one flow till the last page. However, transition books are different in that matter. They divide the stories into small chapters. The story might be a little longer, than picture books or easy readers, but the highlight here is that it is divided into chapters. So now, your child can read the whole story while it is divided into small sections, and as these chapters are small, it would not result in your child experiencing breaks in the story or losing continuity in any form.
You can imagine how this can serve as a preparatory phase before your child begins to read children’s novels. To ease this transition process further, these books also use more pictures than children’s novels.
Children’s Novels:
Finally, once your child can easily read transition books too, they can move on to Children’s Novels (Remember, don’t rush the process, although not all children need to follow this same pattern in the same way while learning to read. So for now, let us try to follow this approach unless you feel your child is comfortable moving on to sections without necessarily following this pattern). All of us might be familiar with children’s novels, as you might have been with picture books. To identify a children’s novel look at books that have little to no pictures, and have mostly text. The words used here would also be more difficult than those in the earlier three categories. Remember how your child began their journey of reading by first comprehending pictures? Here, pictures are not as important as the text like in picture books or easy readers. So, in most cases, your child would be reading the story by focusing mainly on the text. A natural question that might enter your mind now could be, ‘What about graphic novels or comics? Are they always just for children because they have more pictures than text?’ Afraid not so. However, that is a bigger question and will be explored in the upcoming articles.
This might have helped you take a dip in the vast pool of children’s literature, and how your child can transition gradually from reading picture books to children’s novels. Wait, but now that you know this information, what can you do with it? Well, one thing you can do is to observe how your child reads, read some books aloud to them, and try to observe, look at and identify children’s books that fall into each of these categories when you come across some. But how exactly do you choose books for your child, or what steps can you follow? We will explore this in detail in the next article. Happy Reading!
Source, Images: Designed by Freepik, with some edits done to one of the images.
Disclaimer: A random set of books that fall into these categories have been chosen. Their links are provided at different parts of the article. You can look at them and purchase them through the links provided.