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Storytelling is one of the most important learning activities for children since reading aloud from a picture book stimulates children's curiosity, emotional development, and imagination. For effective education, the procedures for storytelling activities need to be improved according to the children's level of curiosity. However, young children are not able to complete questionnaires, making it difficult to analyze their level of interest. This paper proposes a method to estimate children's curiosity in picture book reading activities at five levels by recognizing children's behavior using acceleration and angular velocity sensors placed on their heads. We investigated the relationship between children's behaviors and their levels of curiosity, listed all observed behaviors, and clarified the behavior for estimating curiosity. Furthermore, we conducted experiments using motion sensors to estimate these behaviors and confirmed that the accuracy of estimating curiosity from sensor data is approximately 72%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we aim to explore the interconnection between Children's Literature and contemporary technologies, though not from the perspective of technology as a didactic tool or as a media to produce or reproduce literary texts. Instead, we examine how technology is present in books for children and picture books. This approach is based on the concepts of children's literature, and childhood and technologies. We also present an initial corpus of stories and picture books either about technology or in which technology structures the book or the narrative. Our conclusion is that in some texts the encounter of both worlds produces significant literary experiences. However, there is a literary core that cannot be integrated with technology. This tension is also part of the cultural representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim. School segregation is a common theme of children's books on minority groups living in the United States. Although it is primarily associated with black-white racial divisions, currently it also concerns white-Latino or rich-poor disparities. The aim of this paper is to analyse children's picture books featuring Latino and African American characters who participate in the struggle against school segregation. The authors of the books, being members of racial minorities themselves, offer differing perspectives on the problem. Although they criticise school segregation, they also focus on the white perspective and the reasons why integrating schools has always been hard to achieve. Methods. The study analyses the visual and verbal narratives of selected picture books using a variety of methods for examining this literary format. Among others, it applies the theory of picture book analysis by Martin Painter, William Moebius, Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott. Results. The article shows that despite the existing scholarship on race-related problems in American schools, children's literature seems to be the medium which tries to explain the problem to youngsters being directly involved in the system of segregation. Conclusions. The results can be useful to educators who cope with the issue of racial diversity in American schools. They may consider using selected titles of children's literature as teaching aids assisting students from minority groups in the process of self-development and empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore how the use of semiotic metaphors in picture books contributes to children's understanding of the stories. The three picture books selected for analysis were written during the twentieth century and respond to a standard of literary quality: Guess How Much I Love You (1994), Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and Gorilla (1983). The concept of semiotic metaphor as a tool to create ideational meaning is analysed within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Systemic-Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Kay O'Halloran extends the Hallidayan concept of grammatical metaphor to the semiotic metaphor in order to determine how verbal and visual modes interact with each other in multimodal texts. Like grammatical metaphor, semiotic metaphor also involves a shift in the grammatical class or function of an element. As this process does not take place intrasemiotically, but rather inter-semiotically, the reconstrual produces a semantic change in the function of that element, creating a new way of making meaning and representing reality. The results of the analysis show that semiotic metaphors are essentially used in children's tales to facilitate young children's understanding of the story by making some abstract phenomena related to states of being more concrete and specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the presence of people of color and white people as protagonists in a sample of recently published children's picture books. The author proposes that the relative lack of books about people of color in the sample is reflective of colorblind ideology, denies children of color the opportunity to find themselves in books, and may support the development of racist attitudes in white children. The need for children of color and white children to be exposed to a variety of titles in which contemporary children of color are protagonists is presented as a social justice issue, related to the Jesuit values of cura personalis and magis. Recommendations are made for teachers, educators of teachers, and parents for locating quality picture book titles featuring diverse protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this text is to analyse two recently been published pop-up books aimed at children, by Anouck Boisrobert e Louis Rigaud, Popville (2009) and Dans la forêt du paresseux [Wake up, Sloth!, En el bosque del perezoso] (first published in 2009 and 2012, accompanied with texts by Joy Sorman and Sophie Strady, respectively). These books were published originally in France by Hélium Editions, but they can now be found in several western countries and in many languages (Catalan, French, Dutch, English, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, at least). The objective is to analyse their verbal text and their visual aspects produced by a sophisticated paper engineered to question how they achieve what seems to be one of their goals, the promotion of the readers' ecoliteracy (Orr, 1992) by his involvement in the reading process. This issue seems to be one of the main trends on children's literature in western societies nowadays, transcending the traditional and almost omnipresent role of scenario that nature plays in many children's narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a 2004 paper from psychologist Daniela O'Neill and colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Ontario which shows the relationship of human's innate capacities and mathematics. It noted that O'Neil and her team conducted a study for children with ages ranging from three and four. The children were given a picture book for them to tell a story. Two years after the study, the team set various academic achievement tests to the same children. It was found out that vocabulary and sentence length have little relations to the test performances, but the sophistication with which the children told their stories revealed relationship to future mathematical ability.