Don’t Leave the Story in the Book: Using Literature to Guide Inquiry in Early Childhood Classrooms

216 pages • P/B
ISBN 9780807752876

Drawing from 30 years of teaching and professional development experience, this book offers a roadmap for using children’s literature to provide authentic learning. Featuring a “storyteller’s voice,” each chapter includes a case study about how a particular fiction or nonfiction work can be used in an early childhood classroom; a series of open-ended questions to help readers construct their own inquiry units; and a bibliography of children’s literature

Contents:

Foreword by Jie-Qi Chen
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Work of a Lifetime

PART I: PRAXIS AND PRACTICES

1. How Are Learning Communities Like Stone Soup? Exploring a Praxis
2. What Can We Learn from the Three Little Pigs? The Three Es of Quality Intellectual Work
3. Can Cinderella’s Slipper Be Gold Instead of Glass? The Role of Questions in Quality Intellectual Work
4. How Can We Play with Abiyoyo? The SIP of Play and Quality Intellectual Work
5. What Makes a Good Goldilocks? Assessing the Quality of Picture Books

PART II: DISCIPLINED INQUIRES

6. How Long Is Tikki Tikki Tembo? What’s the Problem with Naked Numbers?
7. How Did the Sun and Moon Come to be in the Sky? Playing with the Amazing Facts of Science
8. How Do You Get from Patches to a Patchwork Quilt? Reading an Object to Spark Inquiry Across the Curriculum
9. Who’s the Strongest? What Makes Stories Such Effective Tools For Quality Intellectual Work
Appendix: The Essential ABCs
Notes
Bibliography of Children’s Literature
References
Index

“Books and stories do not automatically produce quality intellectual work in the classroom. Intellectual quality depends also on adults—committed and intentional teachers and parents who activate the potential of stories. To help teachers build on what they know about stories, Mary describes praxes for using books that are grounded in well-defined principles of teaching and learning.”
—From the Foreword by Jie-Qi Chen, Erikson Institute