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Grownup reading.

Article Excerpt
My five-year-old granddaughter, Libby, loves to play Grownup. Little does she know it's a game she'll play for the rest of her life. But for now, she's engaged in the old standbys Tea Party and Dress-Up as well as in a few of her own variants: Grownup Business, Grownup Teacher, and Grownup Reading.

Grownup Reading isn't the time for bedtime favorites like Gossie & Gertie or Ella Sarah Gets Dressed. What Libby wants to do is sit down and talk about what I'm reading. Clearly, books such as Render unto Caesar or Random Family hold little appeal for her; she goes straight for People and Entertainment Weekly. She sits down with me, thumbs through the magazines, and begins conversations about the advertisements (usually related to candy), the latest movies (Finding Nemo and Freaky Friday), and pop stars (Britney Spears--don't ask). This game represents a kind of literary dressup where a child tries on subjects of interest to the larger society.

As Libby grows older, children's and young adult literature will offer her many opportunities to extend this process. Some of those opportunities will come from traditional juvenile authors; in other cases, writers for adults will introduce her to interests that will take her beyond her immediate world. And, as they have been for children for years and years, many of those interests will be served by nonfiction.

During the first half of the twentieth century, nonfiction for children began to emerge as a distinct form. Before this time, nonfiction primarily consisted of descriptions of everyday items, instructions in manners, or information about the natural world. Departing from these patterns, juvenile biographies and histories by authors such as George Makepeace Towle, Charles Coffin, Eva March Tappan, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson showed history not as a collection of facts to be learned but as an age to be experienced. After Lucy Sprague Mitchell published her Here and Now Story Book, writers of science books began to echo her observation that children find wonder in discovering the world around them rather than in just identifying its components. Soon writers for adults and prominent authorities in their respective fields (such as Raymond Ditmars, Roy Chapman Andrews, Franklyn M. Branley, Carroll Lane Fenton, and William E. Scheele) began turning their attention to children's nonfiction. As Ruth Hill Viguers states in A Critical History of Children's Literature, these "scientists [of the 1920s] began to realize ... they could recapture the thrills of their first discoveries and transmit that enthusiasm to children." The resulting books rejected both utilitarian and didactic approaches and, although instructive, entertained and delighted children as well. And they marked a new kind of juvenile nonfiction, books in which authors shared information with readers whom they treated as equal partners in discovery.

Clearly one did not have...

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