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What our experts say . . .

Children's literature specialists offer their advice and thoughts on books and reading:

Children's books on the iPad by Kiwa Media
You can't judge a book by its cover...but will that matter in the future? by Jan Stroud
An extract from 'Abecedary' by Kate De Goldi
Reading as a 'Sport' by Julie Harper
The Elsie Locke Writing Prize 2009 by Margaret Styles
Developing Tastes by Philippa Werry
Connectivity enhances children's literature by Gerri Judkins
Christchurch's COCA Gallery and New Zealand Picture Book Illustration by Sheila Sinclair
Boys and reading by John McIntyre
Levelled Readers: Essential Scaffolds – or Censorship? by Neale Pitches and Don Long

You can’t judge a book by its cover – but will that matter in the future?
by Jan Stroud

I would like to write about two things that have been on my mind of late. One is the continuing importance of cover design in book sales, and the other is the book industry’s current predicament over the emergence of electronic devices.

I have been selling books for several years now and it appears to me that a cover can make a great deal of difference when it comes to child readers. When adults buy a book, although a bad cover might make them wonder why the publisher made that choice, a wider range of factors affect their decision, such as recommendations on radio and television or in magazines – which are proven to have an instant influence on sales regardless of covers.

Children are a very different story. Even if parents, the media or bookshop staff recommend a book, the cover will often make the difference between children taking a look at the book, or not.

It is important that the cover gives an idea of the book’s content, but it also has to have what I can only call the ‘X factor’. There are many fine examples of this. The Swallows and Amazons or Little House on the Prairie series have timeless covers that evoke the past but continue to work well for children. Newer titles that primary level children are excited about include books by Anthony Horowitz and Justin D’ath, and the Geronimo Stilton and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. The Zac Power series is unique as, although the content is very much for a younger reader, its cover design makes older children, too, amenable to reading it.

In the past few years New Zealand covers have improved and can match books from anywhere in the world. Overseas customers are impressed by our quality and range, especially of picture flats and teenage reads. The Kiwi Bites series has disappeared, due to poor sales. This is a shame, as there are few New Zealand books that cater for the early to independent readers, but I’m sure the lack of sales was due to the old-fashioned and unappealing cover design.

With the increase in portable reading devices coming onto the market, some ‘experts’ have said that the book industry will collapse by November 2012. I can see that there will definitely be a change in the market as we have known it. The obvious appeal of the electronic device can be seen most keenly in the requirements of adult readers, who appreciate the convenience of carrying around a small screen rather than a bulky paperback in their pocket. But when I read, the feel, smell and look of a book add to the experience and are of equal importance. Will schools and parents embrace these new devices for children’s books? Time will tell. In the meantime I maintain that a small computer screen will never allow the same connection with readers that the more traditional book format allows. The electronic device may even increase the difficulty of getting some children to read an entire book, especially those that would rather play computer games or facebook their friends.

With all the uncertainty being felt in the publishing world at the moment, I hope that publishers continue to understand the importance of cover design in book sales, so that our children will continue to choose from a wide range of high-quality books to inspire them for many years to come – whatever the medium might be.

Jan Stroud is the children’s book buyer at University Book Shop in Dunedin. With a background in design and mother to three adult children, Jan is passionate about children’s books, especially picture books.

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kiwa media set to launch children's books for the iPad

New Zealand company Kiwa Media is set to launch interactive, touch-enabled educational content for the iPad. Kiwa Media will be working in partnership with educational publishers to create relevant content to support teachers in schools across the globe. Kiwa Media recognises the benefits of working with educational publishers to provide high-quality digital content with robust pedagogy on devices such as the iPad.

‘Working in partnership with educational publishers is central to our strategy,’ says Roger Shakes, Kiwa Media’s Vice President Business Development. ‘We’re looking for publishers who have a reputation for publishing high-quality educational material. We’re taking our knowledge, expertise and experience in developing technology suitable for the classroom. The mechanism for delivering content is changing, but the pedagogy remains intact so we’re working with educational publishers to ensure we meet both objectives.’

Kiwa Media is already enjoying success in digital publishing with its innovative QBook product. QBook is an interactive, read-along digital storybook for children on Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Kiwa Media has agreements in place with a number of publishers, including Penguin New Zealand, and the move into educational publishing is a natural expansion of the company’s capabilities.

‘We’ve seen tremendous interest in QBook and our Content Universal Tool for creating interactive digital content,’ says Luke Tomes, Kiwa’s Vice President Technology. ‘We have a fantastic opportunity to produce educational materials that use all the features and functions of devices like the iPad. We’ll be developing digital content for 21st-century classrooms. We want to encourage best practice for teachers using technology in the classroom by producing content with sound pedagogy that enhances literacy development.’

In each QBook, users will discover a host of features and functions, including the ability to touch a word to hear it being spoken, and touch and hold a word to hear it being spelt. They can even record their own narration. This extensive range of features has helped to generate interest worldwide.

‘QBooks have some really fun elements within each title. There’s a Memory Pairs game and a Wordfind puzzle to keep children entertained, but the book remains at the core of everything we do,’ says Shakes. ‘We’ve also added a number of foreign languages, including Māori, Spanish and Japanese, that help drive sales overseas.’

In the first few months since their release, QBooks have been downloaded in over 40 countries, reflecting the global nature of digital books. You can try a QBook for free by downloading Penguin’s Sebastian’s Tail QBook Lite from the iTunes App Store (itunes.com/app/kiwamedia)

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Abecedary (An extract)
By Kate De Goldi

We are grateful to Kate De Goldi for permission to reproduce this extract from her keynote speech, entitled ‘Abeceddary’, at the Spinning Gold New Zealand Children’s Writers’ and Illustrators’ Conference.

A is for archive and antecedents and ancestors … the archive and antecedents and ancestral writers and illustrators of children’s literature … the work that has gone before us. It may seem an obvious point to make, but the fundamental job of a writer for children is, I believe, to be familiar with the form in which they are writing, with the prodigal variety of voices and approaches the form has produced.
  An important part of any children’s writing workshop I facilitate is introducing participants to great writers and illustrators in the form. And that’s writers and illustrators from the last century, not just the last decade. It’s been amazing to me over the years how many people arrive at a workshop, genuinely hot with the desire to write for children, having read maybe Heidi or some Enid Blyton or perhaps a little Roald Dahl … but very little else. Writing and reading are mirror twins. Each feeds the other. Reading the magnificent body of children’s literature in English is as good a creative writing workshop as any. It was certainly my only writing workshop. It is reading – and rereading – the great exemplars of the form that has taught me about structure, about character nuance and sentence music, about place and symbol and metaphor, about the child’s eye, but also – and crucially – that it is possible to write about anything for children … and – even more crucially – that it is possible to do it in a hundred different – and demanding – ways.
  Francis Spufford in his fabulous book The Child that Books Built writes about the ‘hopeful springtime’ of children’s writing (the publishing of the 60s and 70s and 80s) that fed and excited his growing years. My heart leapt the first time I read this because he described precisely the territory of my own youthful reading … my nourishment at the knees of writers who made me want to do what they did. He wrote:

I began my reading … in a golden age comparable to the present heyday of J K Rowling and Philip Pullman, or to the great Edwardian decade when Nesbit, Kipling and Kenneth Grahame were all publishing at once. An equally amazing generation of talent was at work as the 1960s ended and the 70s began. William Mayne was making dialogue sing; Peter Dickinson was writing the Changes trilogy; Alan Garner was reintroducing myth into the bloodstream of daily life; Jill Paton Walsh was showing that children’s perceptions could be just as angular and uncompromising as those of adults; Joan Aiken had begun her Dido Twite series of comic fantasies; Penelope Farmer was being unearthly with Charlotte Sometimes; Diana Wynne Jones’s gift for wild invention was hitting its stride; Rosemary Sutcliff was just adding the final uprights to her colonnade of Romano-British historical novels; Leon Garfield was reinventing the eighteenth century as a scene for inky Gothic intrigue. The list went on, and on, and on. [And, I might add, that was only the British] … There was activity everywhere, a new potential classic every few months …

As much as it is important and useful to be conversant with the current literature, I believe fervently that it is vital for a serious children’s writer to plumb the astonishing archive our writing antecedents have left us. What have you read lately?

Kate De Goldi is a children’s book writer and reviewer. She won Book of the Year at the 2009 New Zealand Post Awards for Children and Young Adults with her teen novel The 10pm Question.

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Reading as a 'sport'
by Julie Harper

On any weekend, thousands of parents and other interested parties will brave the elements to accompany their child or children to a wide array of sporting activities. No doubt there is much cheering, and a considerable amount of nail-biting as they pace along the sidelines, but above all, everyone is there to have fun and to celebrate the enthusiasm of the young people taking part. Now imagine, if you can, the same kind of electric atmosphere and enthusiasm surrounding teams of children as they compete in the ‘sport’ of reading knowledge. Since 1991 Wayne Mills has been providing keen readers with the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge of literature and to represent their schools in the Kids’ Lit Quiz. From mid-March through to mid-June, Wayne travels the length and breadth of New Zealand, testing the recall of pupils in Years 6, 7 and 8 (Year 6 pupils were eligible to enter for the first time this year).

The knowledge of these readers is nothing short of amazing – titles of books can be identified from a few words of an opening paragraph, and characters are recognised from physical descriptions that would have been missed by many readers. From nursery rhymes to myths and legends, movie adaptations, classics and contemporary fiction: they are quizzed on it all.

For those of us involved in providing children with a rich and varied diet of books from an early age, it is exceptionally gratifying to have an event that these young people can get excited about and compete in. For many, it is possibly the first time they have represented their school in anything. How wonderful that this opportunity is there for them. But knowledge is not the only thing required – remaining calm and having a ‘game strategy’ is also essential.

It has been the privilege of Jabberwocky Children’s Bookshop to be the principal sponsor for the Auckland heats of the Kids’ Lit Quiz for the past three years, and it is an absolute highlight of our year. Since 2004 the Kids’ Lit Quiz has become an international event, with Wayne also travelling to China, South Africa and the UK. This year the world final was held in South Africa, and New Zealand was represented by Belmont Intermediate from Auckland’s North Shore City.

So keep a look out early next year for heats in your area, and encourage your students to participate – it is well worth the effort!

For more information check out Wayne’s website
www.kidslitquiz.com

Julie Harper has been managing Jabberwocky Children’s Bookshop for 15 years and has twice been a judge for the New Zealand Post Book Awards. She is the New Zealand co-ordinator for Magpies magazine and regularly contributes reviews and articles.

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The Elsie Locke Writing Prize
by Margaret Styles

‘I am from India, and Zaffar is from Pakistan. India and Pakistan are at war. But that doesn’t matter to us. We play soccer in the zone between the two borders. No soldiers ever come here. This is no man’s land. No one’s, just ours.’

So begins Cileme Aroha Venkateswar’s story ‘War Games’, the winner of the first Elsie Locke Writing Prize. Cileme, whose own family comes from India, is a pupil at Ross Intermediate School in Palmerston North. Her story was chosen from more than a thousand entries from Year 7 and 8 pupils throughout New Zealand to win the inaugural prize in an annual competition established by the Elsie Locke Memorial Trust and Learning Media Limited.

Her prize-winning story on the theme of ‘living together in peace and friendship’ will be published in the School Journal Part 4, No 3 2009. She has also received $400 and $100 worth of book vouchers.

Elsie Locke (1912–2001) was one of New Zealand’s best-loved children’s authors. Her books include The Runaway Settlers, The End of the Harbour and A Canoe in the Mist. She also wrote more than 30 stories for the School Journal and a number of historical school bulletins, which became the basis for a series of New Zealand social histories for children and adults.

Locke was active in politics, the peace movement, environmental campaigns and the women’s movement. Her writing was recognised by numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Canterbury (1987), the Margaret Mahy Medal (1995) for her contribution to children’s literature and literacy, and the Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Best-Loved Book (1999) for The Runaway Settlers.

Her family, in the form of the Elsie Locke Memorial Trust, wanted to remember her in an ongoing and appropriate way and, with Learning Media, the publisher of the School Journal, has developed an annual writing competition. Its purpose is to encourage children in Years 7 and 8 to think and write about matters that interested and concerned Locke, including social, political and environmental issues, New Zealand’s social and political history, peace and disarmament, women’s issues and writing for and by children.

The competition will be run in the first term of every school year, with the theme for each year’s competition to be advertised in the last term of the preceding year.

Looking for Answers: A Life of Elsie Locke (Canterbury University Press), a biography by Maureen Birchfield, will be published in September.

Margaret Styles is the Marketing and Communications Manager for Learning Media Ltd. Learning Media have been proud sponsors of the Writers in Schools programme since 2003; and are happy to announce their involvement in the new Elsie Locke Writing Prize.

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Developing Tastes
by Philippa Werry

In our house, we now have two teenagers and another one nearly there. All three are keen readers, and their books are scattered everywhere: junior cookbooks conveniently near the kitchen, library books wherever they were last reading them, and the seven Harry Potter volumes in a bookcase in the hall, so no one can lay special claim to them. But the bookshelves in their rooms tell their own story of their reading history so far.

Oldest child. A whole series of series: John Marsden’s Tomorrow When the War Began, Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Chicken Soup – first for the Kid’s Soul, then for the Teenage Soul. To Kill a Mockingbird – Year 10 English, and a row of NCEA guides to maths, chemistry and science, but tucked among all these are relics of her younger reading self: Roald Dahl’s Matilda and one of Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci books.

Middle child. Her shelves are a jumble (like the rest of her room) but it’s still possible to trace a chronological record of her reading. There are old favourites such as The Railway Children, Charlotte’s Web and Under the Mountain. Seven of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. And more recently, books that tackle serious topics and social issues, such as Anne Frank’s diary. (Sadly, My Family and Other Animals still sits unread, despite my protestations of ‘it’s a classic! you’ll love it!’)

Youngest child. Enjoys the benefit of the ‘trickle-down’ effect; not always appreciated with clothes, but an advantage for books, as her shelves swell with titles the others have grown out of. (I notice she has also managed to ‘borrow’ one of the Sisterhood books, and hasn’t yet returned it.) The storybook-tape sets have found their way to her bedroom, now that her older sisters have CD players and iPods instead. She also gets to keep Roald Dahl’s The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as well as The Faraway Tree Stories. (Despite its outdated feel, there’s something about the idea of the worlds at the top of the tree, and the slippery slide, which is curiously appealing.) The more recent Molly Moon books are hers, though, and so are the Fairy books with their glittering spines (Holly the Christmas Fairy, Storm the Lightning Fairy), because that craze bypassed the others.

But just lately, their reading habits have been changing. The nearly-teenager is graduating from the children’s section, and from watching this process happen twice before I know that the books on the YA shelves vary enormously. Some could still fit into the children’s section; others cover complex and demanding contemporary issues that older adolescents have to wrestle with. It sometimes seems that YA could easily be divided again into Y (Young) YA and O (Older) YA.

At the same time, the oldest teenager is getting ready to make the leap from the well-defined YA section into the wide, sprawling shelves of adult fiction. How do you make that leap? And how do you know what direction to leap in?

Thinking about this recently, I’ve realised that books are just one aspect of their teenage lives where they are busy exploring and defining their tastes. They download music and talk about songs they like, discuss movies they want to see, have favourite clothes shops and styles. They have definite tastes in food. When I’m deciding what to cook for dinner, I know that one is vegetarian, one likes salmon but not tuna and one has (thankfully) grown out of chicken nuggets and now can’t stand them.

In the same way, if I dash into the library to grab a handful of books on the way home, I know that one likes history, one prefers stories set in the modern world; one likes fantasy and one definitely doesn’t. I can recognise the names of authors whose works they have read before and enjoyed.

I was talking recently to someone who happily described himself as a nerdy scientist. He said that when it came to music, he could easily navigate from one band to another, and find his way to different CDs or tracks that he liked, whereas once he stepped inside a library, he was stumped.

It’s true that the shelves of a library or bookshop can seem crowded and daunting, but knowing what you like is a good start. Over the years, my children have built up a clear idea of what kinds of books they do and don’t enjoy, and nowadays they each have their own individual taste in reading. It can be a big leap, from children’s to YA books, and again from YA to adult, but I’m hoping that their history as readers will get them through.

Philippa Werry is a librarian and children’s writer whose non-fiction, poetry, stories and plays have been widely published. Her work has appeared in the School Journal and other educational publications, and some stories have been broadcast on National Radio. The Great Chocolate Cake Bake-off (Scholastic) was included in the Storylines notable books list 2008, and Enemy at the Gate (also Scholastic) was shortlisted in the Junior Fiction section for the New Zealand Post Book Awards 2009.

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Connectivity Enhances Children’s Literature
BY gerri judkins

It is an exciting time to be working in the field of children’s literature, and the connectivity provided by the internet enhances the experience for adults and pupils alike. Our school website uses Moodle, which enables children to check out Southwell school, Hamilton city and National Library catalogues and EPIC databases from the classroom and home. I enjoy highlighting online opportunities via the data show during ‘teaching moments’ at the end of library periods.

Librarians can browse the New Zealand Book Council website to choose an author for a Writer in Schools visit (www.bookcouncil.org.nz/education/writersbyarea.html) and link to an interview on the Christchurch City Libraries site , then explore their other kids’ pages.

We are looking forward to Sharon Holt’s visit in June. If you are sick at home (there’s never time at work), look at the online catalogues of some of our children’s bookstores, such as www.jabberwocky.co.nz and www.childrensbookshop.netstep.co.nz.

The 2009 NZ Post Book Award finalists have been announced. I tell my students that day is right up there, for me, with my birthday and Christmas. Judges Bill Nagelkerke, Rosemary Tisdall and Jenni Keestra have chosen a wonderful selection, which can be viewed at www.booksellers.co.nz/nzpb_main.htm. The Waikato Children’s Literature Association has an evening in Term 2 when we review the books and have the hosting intermediate school’s pupils cover the junior fiction category. It is interesting to see which finalists have websites for authors and illustrators.

This has been a year of firsts for the Storylines Margaret Mahy Day, which was held on 28 March. It was the first time it had been held in the South Island, Andrew Crowe was the first non-fiction writer to receive the medal, and the inaugural Storylines Gavin Bishop Award for Picture Book Illustration, described at www.storylines.org.nz, was announced. This wonderful day was hosted by Te Tai Tamariki, a charitable trust founded in May 2006 to preserve and promote New Zealand children’s literature. Read about their activities at www.tetaitamariki.org.nz/. Storylines events give us the opportunity to meet our online colleagues and clear up misconceptions – for example, Trevor Agnew of School Library Listserv had been under the impression I was male!

For 18 years Wayne Mills has brought reading as a sport to intermediate-aged pupils in New Zealand and now he is taking it to South Africa, Britain and China. You can follow the progress of the New Zealand regionals and find sample questions at www.kidslitquiz.com/NZ/. This competition creates voracious readers who I enjoy bumping into again in later years at bookshops and libraries.

Christchurch will host the SLANZA (School Library Association of NZ Aotearoa) Conference 2009: Turning Heads (www.slanza.org.nz/). If you are not yet a member, check out the benefits of belonging. You can also link from here to subscribe to the afore-mentioned School Library Listserv and keep up with conversations and needs. There are countless requests for book titles. I compile lists of those recommended (though many are above the age level of my pupils), because they all sound so tempting. Today’s requests are for stories about forgiveness and immigrants. Find out too from your local National Library office about network meetings in your area at www.natlib.govt.nz/schools.

Of course, authors’ and popular series websites give background to the author and the stories and entice us to read more. Last night I stayed up till 2am finishing Mary Hoffman’s Stravaganza City of Secrets. This morning I checked out the series website www.stravaganza.co.uk, and then that for the 2009 IASL (International Association of School Librarianship) Conference, www.iasl-online.org to be held in Padua (Padavia in the Stravaganza series) in September, with a day trip to Venice. My husband said in a rash moment, ‘Why don’t you go?’ Yeah, the internet. I’ve bought my ticket ...

Gerri Judkins is a librarian at Southwell School, and a member of the Waikato Children’s Literature Association and SLANZA. You can contact her at gerri.judkins@southwell.school.nz

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CHristchurch's COCA GALlery and new zealand picture book illustration
By Sheila Sinclair

I went recently to the COCA Gallery in Christchurch, to read Gavin Bishop’s wonderful picture book Rats to a group of small children. COCA, along with Te Tai Tamariki, Aotearoa New Zealand Children’s Literature Charitable Trust, held an exhibition of New Zealand illustrators’ work in March and April. Schools and the public had the opportunity to view and celebrate some of the best of New Zealand illustrators’ work. Jenny Cooper, Ruth Paul, Ali Teo, Fraser Williamson and Gavin Bishop were all represented.

The exhibition, which opened with a special evening on 17 March, was beautifully curated by COCA on behalf of Te Tai Tamariki. Cut-outs of characters from the illustrations on show adorned the stark white walls of the gallery, creating an impression of warmth and friendliness. Small chairs and cushions and a plump armchair for storytelling added to the comfortable atmosphere. Copies of picture books containing the exhibited illustrations were scattered around the gallery, allowing viewers to see both the image and the narrative, and to reflect on how the text and illustrations together make the book.

Nicki Wallace-Bell, education officer at COCA, used puzzles and games in a workshop at which children illustrated characters from the books. They were encouraged to ask questions about the illustrations on display and to guess what order they appeared in the book. I then read the story and they reassessed their previous assumptions.

This exhibition is the third that Te Tai Tamariki has organised. Each one has focused on the illustrated works of three or four favourite New Zealand authors and illustrators, and all have been embraced by schools and the public. In keeping with Te Tai Tamariki’s remit of ‘preservation and education’, each exhibition has been supported with an education programme, whereby school groups visit and participate in some way.

Sheila Sinclair was a tutor for the Image and Narrative paper of the National Diploma in Children’s Literature. She has been involved with The Children’s Bookshop for over 20 years and has owned the Christchurch shop since 1997. In 1999 she bought the Dorothy Butler Bookshop and with Dorothy’s blessing renamed it The Children’s Bookshop Auckland. Sheila has been a judge for the New Zealand Post Book Awards and is involved with Te Tai Tamariki.

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Boys and reading
by John McIntyre

‘Boys don't read’ is a refrain I hear often. It is simply not true, nor is it fair. Worse, it can become self-fulfilling and counter-productive to encouraging them to read.

The real issue is that boys don't always read the books the women in their lives (mothers, pre-school, primary and often secondary school teachers, etc.) want them to enjoy. The life-enhancing novel with an emotional toll to pay, the historical romance (and I'll include Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters in this), even Dickens and Shakespeare are unlikely to excite all but the most literary young male reader to a love of literature. Being forced to read Tess of the D'Urbervilles at Teachers College nearly killed English literature for me, and more recently a misguided English teacher repeated the exercise with my son by insisting that he should love The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.

My son is in London now, so I'm not sure what he's perusing other than the local gig guide, but my recent selections are perhaps indicative of how the male species reads.

I've read an autobiography, Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama, Paul Theroux's latest travel book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, a couple of bloke-ish comedies, and I keep up daily with my interest in current affairs, geo-politics and the progress of Chelsea FC by reading four international newspapers online each morning.

In the shop, we are selling lots of the biography of racing drivers Scott Dixon, and Lewis Hamilton, non-fiction titles like Car Science by Richard Hammond (Top Gear) and The Really Short History of Nearly Everything, the young readers’ version of the Bill Bryson bestseller. I spend a considerable amount of time here reassuring worried mothers that non-fiction is a totally valid form of reading, to be celebrated and encouraged.

Robert Muchamore's all-action CHERUB series about a boy agent continues to enthrall boys and girls equally, and we've had wonderful feedback about Spud by John van de Ruit and The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie, both stories about teenage boys’ often achingly funny and occasionally poignant experiences of puberty, school and girls.

The famous Australian author Paul Jennings, himself responsible for making reading fun for a generation, once said ‘the child who doesn't like reading is the child for whom an adult has yet to find the right book’. If you insert the word ‘boy’ for ‘child’, it couldn't be more true.

John McIntyre is one of New Zealand's leading voices in children’s literature. Founder and owner of The Children's Bookshop in Wellington since 1992, he has twice been a judge of the New Zealand Post Book Awards and for six years has been the Children's Book Reviewer on Radio New Zealand’s ‘Nine to Noon’.

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Levelled Readers: Essential Scaffolds – or Censorship?
by Neale Pitches and Don Long

New Zealand is widely respected as one of the pioneers of learn-to-read systems based on matching levelled readers with the reading levels of children. But is respect at risk of turning into notoriety?

In many of the early reading series developed by New Zealand publishers, readers of between eight and sixteen pages are levelled to a ‘colour wheel’, using a system that rates the vocabulary and grammar of each book. As children learn to read, their reading level is constantly matched to the colour-wheel levels. A child assessed as reading at the red level, for example, is taught using books at the red level until they are reading with such ease that an assessment can be made that they are ready to move on to the next level.

The research base for this approach owes much to the Russian child development researcher Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934), who observed that children learn best when they are sufficiently supported by prior knowledge (‘scaffolds’) to tackle new tasks. He coined the term ‘zone of proximal development’ to describe an ideal learning state in which a student is sufficiently skilled to go to the next level of learning. The details of these levels were then described by the Swiss researcher, Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Anyone who trained to be a primary school teacher in New Zealand in the second half of the twentieth century will recall learning about the implications of the work of Vygotsky and Piaget.

But two major problems are now emerging with levelled reading.

First, some schools, particularly some elementary schools in the United States, are using the level colours not just on instructional readers, but on every book in the school library. Worse still, some of them stop children from reading books above their designated colour, on the grounds that these books are too difficult and could interfere with the children’s reading progress. There can be little doubt that this is a form of censorship, even if it comes with good intentions, and it is disturbing to hear of similar practices in New Zealand.

Second, colour-wheel-based levelling systems are now being used by some educators too rigidly. This results in a failure to acknowledge that, while a child may be generally achieving at a particular colour level, on some topics they will be able to read more or less fluently if they have sufficient background knowledge and, more importantly, are engaged by a particular piece of text.

For example, let’s imagine a boy called Ofisa who lives near an airport. Ofisa loves planes. He is fascinated with the way they land and take off and with what keeps them up in the air – their aerodynamics. Let’s say that Ofisa needs shared reading instruction at the blue level (fluency) and guided reading instruction at the orange level (early fluency). His independent reading level is green. Now imagine that Ofisa spots The Big Book of Planes in the school library, an action-packed picture book at the blue level with brilliant illustrations, detailed captions, cutaway drawings, and so on. So how can it be that Ofisa can read The Big Book of Planes fluently and with great enjoyment, despite this book being ‘above’ his independent level? It’s because reading fluency is about a child’s background knowledge and their personal motivation to read a particular book. It’s not about their ‘level’.

So, for his own good, should Ofisa be denied access to books like our imaginary The Big Book of Planes to read independently – books that are ‘too hard’ for him, even if on a topic he loves?

Ever since the alphabet was invented, human creativity and curiosity have driven the motivation to read and write. As we see in the example of Anne Frank’s extraordinary and wonderful diary, even a young writer can produce exceptional written language, which an engaged reader can hardly bear to put down. Are we comfortable with living in an era in which some young readers are discouraged from reading such work, just because it is ‘beyond their level’ – and is this really the practical outcome that Vygotsky and Piaget were pointing us towards? Indeed, isn’t it time for publishers to carefully reconsider the wholesale application of colour wheel-based reading levels to reading material for children? Should such systems be applied beyond the confines of reading instruction? Even within a reading series, should colour wheel indications appear anywhere on a book? Isn’t that something that should be restricted to a teacher’s guide? Maybe it is time for teachers and parents to start to think a bit more deeply about what they are doing when they steer a child away from a book on topics a child is interested in, just because they think it will be ‘too hard’. And do indications of reading levels have any place in school libraries and public library children’s book collections? We wonder.

Neale Pitches is the CEO of South Pacific Press. Don Long is a children’s book author.

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