Children's literature includes works written for readers from toddlers to teenagers and encompasses genres such as picture books, storybooks, traditional folktales, historical fiction, modern fantasy, realistic fiction, nonfiction, autobiographies, biographies, poetry, and plays. Children's literature has benefits like allowing creative response, developing cultural appreciation, and promoting social and emotional growth. Pedagogical implications for teaching literature include scaffolding instruction, modeling thinking strategies, cooperative learning, independent reading, and literary response activities. Teachers can develop skills like comprehension, metacognition, and summarization through strategies such as graphic organizers, games, writing, and literature circles.

2. Children’s Literature
and Pedagogical
Implications
for Teaching
Literature
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3. Children’s Literature
• Comprises a wide variety of writings for readers from very young kids
(toddlers) to adolescents (teenagers) approaching maturity and
adulthood (Laffrado, 1995)
• Produced out of the writer’s imagination to creatively illustrate the
wonder and dynamics of childhood
• Written and produced for children
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4. Characteristics
• Simple, naïve, unsophisticated, natural, and uncomplicated
• Dwells on the present, on the here and now of everyday problems
and difficulties that beset people
• Echoes the feelings, mood, sensitivities, and experiences of children
from the standpoint and attitude of a child
• Adorned with illustrations
• Deliberate repetition of words and ideas
• Avoids and steers away from adult themes
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5. Characteristics
• Often action-packed and is inclined to dwell on fantasy, imagination,
and castle-in-the-sky hopes and dreams
• Teaches moral lesson, making it instructional and education
• Usually involves happy endings
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6. Children’s literature include:
• Picture books
• Story books
• Traditional literature
• Historical fiction
• Modern fantasy
• Realistic fiction
• Nonfiction or information books
• Autobiography and Biography
• Children’s poetry
• Children’s drama
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7. Picture Books
• Contain pictures
to tell a story
and provide a
delightful visual
experience to
children
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8. Storybooks
• Contain stories accompanied by
pictures and illustrations where
there is more text than pictures
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9. Traditional Literature
• Writings that are handed
down from one generation
to another
• Include folk tales, legends,
myths, proverbs, etc.
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10. Historical Fiction
• Some facts in the story can be traced to
real historical events involving real
historical individuals, allowing children
to take a trip back in time. Some of the
events in the story however are a
product of the writer’s inventiveness,
imagination, and creativity.
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11. Modern Fantasy
• Involves fantastic elements such as talking
animals and magical beings
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12. Realistic Fiction
• Made-up stories but true in real-life
• Children play as the main characters thereby allowing children to feel
or go through an experience as if it were true.
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13. Nonfiction or Informational Books
• Provide information that develops
children’s knowledge about the world
(e.g. science, travel, life skills, new
outlook, etc.)
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14. Autobiography and Biography
• Stories of life that are actually lived
• Autobigraphy – written by oneself
• Biography – written by someone else
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15. Children’s Poetry
• Develops children’s creativity by letting them express their emotions
and imagination through verses and the interplay of rhyme, rhythm
and other literary expressions
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16. Children’s Drama
• Presented through dialogue and action making use of costumes,
props, lighting, music, and sound
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17. Benefits of Literature
to Children
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18. Benefits
1. Provides learners the chance to creatively respond and cultivate
their own thoughts about a variety of topics
2. Enables students to develop appreciation of their own culture and
of others
3. Develops students’ emotional strength, stability, steadfastness,
resourcefulness, and ingenuity
4. Promotes social maturity and helps develop social development
5. Promotes and preserves a people’s cultural and literary heritage
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19. Pedagogical Implications
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20. Pedagogy
• involves the teaching-learning methods and/or strategies used to
achieve lesson objectives considering different factors in the
teaching-learning process as informed by educational theories and
principles.
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21. Pedagogical Implications
1. Scaffold instruction – students are given a lot of structures at the
beginning and these structures are removed little by little until the
students are capable of doing it themselves.
2. Modeling – while reading or discussing a literary work, the teacher
thinks out loud his/her thoughts related to the text.
3. Cooperative learning – students work together in small groups and
engage in tasks that involve risks and higher level thinking skills
instead of the conventional question-answer teaching strategy
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22. Pedagogical Implications
4. Independent reading – done to promote reading, writing, and
thinking skills
5. Literary response – students act in response to what they read
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23. Other strategies
• Using graphic and semantic organizers
• Competitive games
• Writing activities
• Journal entries
• Literature circles
• Choral readings
• Readers’ theater
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24. Skills developed using literary strategies
• Text comprehension
• Metacognition
• Recognizing story structure
• Summarizing
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25. “Don’t make literature difficult. Do not torture your students with too
much mind-bending tests. Make literature interesting, enjoyable.”
-F. Sionil José
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