This week I started the subject that I have been most looking forward to in this entire course, Children's Literature. I have always had a love of picture books and sharing my favourite books with my own kids has been a lot of fun. We have all come to love The Jolly Postman series by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. Surprisingly though, my love of the Hairy Maclary series (I love the rhyme, rhythm and illustrations) has stopped at me. My son, from early on has shown a love for Pamela Allen and will still occasionally bring home one even though he is nearly 9 and they aren't in his "section" of the school library. My daughter is more of a mystery when it comes to books. Early on she liked any character that she saw on tv that was on the cover of a book, now, at 5 and a half there is no one author in particular she just likes any book about fairies or princesses.
Some of the readings for ETL 402 deal with the history of children's literature and this, which I thought was going to be quite boring and tiresome, turned out to be very interesting.
Some highlights are:
* Middle Ages - stories were passed down orally and acted out in plays
* 1440's - Gutenberg invented the printing press
* 1476 - Caxton introduced the printing press to England
* 1500's - Illustrations began to accompany text
* 1689 - 1800's - The New England Primer, that taught the alphabet and lesson in morality, became popular and is thought to have sold between 6 to 8 million copies
* 1697 - Charles Perrault published French fairy tales titled "Tales of Mother Goose" and children started to read for enjoyment
* Early 1770's - adventure books became popular with Robinson Crusoe (DeFoe, 1719) and Gulliver's Travels (Swift, 1726) being published
* 1744 - Newberry published "A Pretty Little Pocketbook", written and illustrated exclusively to entertain and teach children. Illustrations became coloured, not woodcut.
* 1812 - Grimm brothers published their book of fairy tales
* 1846 - Lear published the first book of limericks and humour, "The Book of Nonsense"
* From 1860's genres in children's literature began expanding with stories about , family (Little Women by Alcott in 1867); animals (The Jungle Book by Kipling in 1894); fantasy ( Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Carroll in 1865); science fiction (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Verne in 1870); and poetry ( A Child's Garden of Verse by Stevenson in 1885).
* 1860's - Evans mastered mutiblock wood engraving and colour printing became less expensive and picturebooks for children began being published
* 1906 - Anderson's original fairy tales were published
* Early 1900's - separate divisions for children's literature were created in publishing houses. Children's rooms were created in libraries
* 1920's - Book week was established
* Late 1920's - children's books cost aproximately $2 and were usually onlt bought as Christmas or birthday presents. Simon Shuster began publishing Golden books for 25c
* 1930's - the offset press which developed. This enabled books to be printed in colour, inexpensively and in large quantities
* 1934 - comic books were introduced and crossword puzzle books began to be published
* 1950's - information books flooded the market
* 1971 - Scholastic began to market book clubs to Australian schools
* 1980's - Children's books were linked with popular tv shows and videos and audio tapes were released
* 1990's - digital books began to emerge
(Information from: Barone, D. M. (2011). A brief history of children's literature. Children's literature in the classroom : engaging lifelong readers (pp. 8-19). New York: Guilford Press and Madej, K. (2003). Towards digital narrative for children: from education to entertainment, a historical perspective. ACM Computers and Entertainment, Vol. 1, No. 1.)
