This study seeks to understand how children express themselves socially and emotionally in play negotiations in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. It addresses the following research questions: What strategies do children employ in play negotiations? How do these strategies manifest themselves socially and emotionally? The study…

Superhero themes have been increasingly used in the teaching of a range of topics including business, humanities and science in recent years. Typically, characters from existing popular media are adopted for the teaching activities. On the other hand, customised characters that are developed from scratch allow the educator to have more control of…

Although stories for children often feature supernatural and fantastical events, children themselves often prefer realistic events when choosing what should happen in a story. In two experiments, we investigated whether 3- to 5-year-olds (total N = 240 from diverse backgrounds) might be more likely to include fantastical events in stories about…

Nicolás Guillén's "El gran zoo" (1967), illustrated by Fayad Jamís, was the first Hispanic bestiary to prominently feature humans in a space traditionally inhabited by beasts. Guillén's verses transform the bestiary from a didactic tool used for centuries to instruct and uniform society into a subversive text that openly denounces the…

The purpose of this qualitative study is to better understand how children identify with superheroes to allow counselors to have a basis of understanding to inform their use of superheroes in therapeutic settings. The research questions are: (1) How do children ages 3-6 identify with their favorite superhero? and (2) how is children's self-concept…

As children get older, they become better able to discriminate between impossible and improbable statements and they realize that improbable events can occur in reality while impossible ones cannot. However, when children hear about extraordinary events from fictional entities (e.g., popular characters from children's media), they may be more…

The purpose of this study is to consider Superman's acts against impulse-momentum and conservation of momentum principles. Superheroes as fantasy fiction characters attract the attention of not only children and teenagers but also adults. Superheroes can be useful in explaining a phenomenon, as well as overcoming conceptual difficulties that may…

The article deals with the analysis of literary narrative where a possible unreal fictional world and a possible real fictional world usually coexist. When the norms of life plausibility are consciously violated, the real and the unreal possible worlds are emphatically opposed. Hence, their certain aspects are depicted in a fantastically…

How do young children decide which events can happen within fictional stories (extension) and learn new information from these stories (export)? In two studies, we investigate these two issues as well as the influence of story genre (realistic or fantastical) on these processes. Preschoolers (N = 192) heard either a realistic or fantastical story…

"Writing Strategies for Talent Development" helps educators incorporate effective and engaging writing strategies into their classroom that are designed to reach struggling and gifted students alike. This guide demonstrates how teachers can provide the means to write (with appropriate tools and classroom structures), the motivation to…

The ability to generate narratives is important for literacy development. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been found to generate less complex narratives than typically developing peers. This pilot AB study was designed to investigate the efficacy of a brief intervention procedure to develop the macrostructure of original…

This study examined parent-child storytelling for insights into children's fantastical thinking. We targeted differences in storytelling based on story genre (fictional-reality and fictional-fantasy) emotion, and storyteller, and how dyads treated fantasy within the stories. 49 3- to 5-year-olds and their parents told stories based on images that…

Fanfiction is a valid form of literacy expression often overlooked in academic settings. This study used a mixed-methods approach to understand the facets of fanfiction reading and writing in adults. Survey data was first collected to understand who are the adults choosing to read and write fanfiction. Based on survey results, individual cases…

Picturebooks are defined by the interaction of words and pictures to convey narrative (Bader, 1976; Kiefer, 1995; Sipe, 2011), referred to in this study as the word-picture relationship. This dissertation study extends on the work of others who investigated young children's responses to picturebooks (e.g., Arizpe & Styles, 2016; Sipe, 2008a;…

With many of the Catholic student population disengaged from regular ritual experiences their working vocabulary of the prayers and knowledge of the Church is limited. A beneficial bridge for many of these disconnected students, specifically male adolescents has been the use of storytelling in connection to Catholic themes to lay the foundations…