From: Kathleen Horning <horning>
Date: Tue, 04 Nov 1997 16:20:07 -0600

In November we're discussing a topic currently of great interest in the field of children's books: picture books for older readers. By "older" we mean upper elementary school ages and even up into the middle school ages.

In our discussion of World War Two fiction last month, there were several books mentioned which fit this category and CCBC-Net subscriber Judy Zuckerman has suggested others, including:
  "Baseball Saved Us" by Ken Muchizuki;
  "The Bicycle Man" by Allen Say;
  "The Bracelet" by Yoshiko Uchida;
  "Faithful Elephants" by Yukio Tsuchiya;
  "Hiroshima No Pika" by Toshi Maruki;
  "The Lily Cupboard" by Shulamith Levey Oppenheim;
  "Min and the War Effort" by Millie Lee;
  "My Daddy Was a Soldier" by Deborah Kogan Ray; "Sadako" by Eleanor Coerr, with illustrations by Ed Young;
   "Star of Fear, Star of Hope" by Jo Hoestlandt.

If you are familiar with any of the above-listed titles, please consider the question: what qualities make these books suitable for older readers? If any of you have experience with sharing these books with children, please let us know how you introduced them and how the children responded.

Kathleen T. Horning Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education University of Wisconsin-Madison
Received on Tue 04 Nov 1997 04:20:07 PM CST