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Big books  an oversized book with large print, either commercially produced or handmade.
Board books  books designed for infants and toddlers; board books are well constructed with heavy laminated cardboard or plastic pages that will withstand teeth and sticky fingers.
Concept book  a concept book describes various dimensions of an object, a class of objects, or an abstract idea.
Controlled-vocabulary books  a new genre of book was created when Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat in 1957. This book was written with a controlled vocabulary (derived from the Dolch vocabulary list of 220 words) for the young child to read independently. Since then many publishers have developed "easy reading" books.
Cumulative tale  cumulative tales have repeated patterns and phrases that become longer and longer with each incident.
Cut-out books  a book that has holes cut through the pages so that the illustrations on the following page may be seen through the holes.
Finger rhymes  a game involving a rhyme and accompanying finger motions. Finger plays date back to the time of Friedrich Froebel, the so-called father of the kindergarten movement, who collected the finger plays and games that the peasant mothers in the German countryside were using with their children.
Identification  the process of naming items that appear in the illustrations of a book; for example, ABC books can be used for identification or naming, as they provide the young child with large, bright pictures of animals or single objects to look at and talk about.
Instructional scaffold  Jerome Bruner was the first to use the term scaffold to characterize adult assistance to children's language development; some books can be an instructional scaffold or a temporary help in the child's first attempts to read. Such books include familiar texts like Mother Goose rhymes or songs that children know by heart and can easily "read"; or they might be books with repetitive language or story patterns that help children remember or predict the story easily.
Lift-the-flap books  books that inspire interaction through flaps that a child can lift to see what is behind the flap; for example, in Where's Spot? by Eric Hill, Spot's mother, Sally, searches for her puppy behind a door, inside a clock, under the stairs, in the piano, and under the rug. As the child opens doors and lifts up flaps to join in the search, highly unlikely creatures such as monkeys, snakes, and lions answer no to the question "Is he in here?"
One-to-one correspondence  an exact match, one to one.
Phonemic awareness  researchers have now linked children's experience with nursery rhymes and speech play to the development of sensitivity to the sounds within words, an ability they call "phonemic awareness." This ability to manipulate the sounds of words as they sing and chant nursery rhymes is a necessary foundation for understanding relationships between letters and sounds and contributes to children's emergent literacy development.
Predictable book  predictable books that can help an emergent reader can be identified by such characteristics as repetitive language patterns or story patterns or the use of familiar sequences like numbers, the days of the week, or hierarchical patterns. Frequently, texts combine several of these characteristics in a single story.
Toy books  some books have a kind of "built-in participation" as part of their design; these books have flaps to lift up and peek under, soft flannel to touch, or holes to poke fingers through. Such books can serve as the transition between toys and real books.
Wordless book  wordless books are picture books in which the story line is told entirely through pictures. They are increasingly popular with today's TV-oriented child. Many of them are laid out in the same sequential story as comic books and have wide appeal to different age levels.







Kiefer Child Lit 9eOnline Learning Center

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