What are preschool teachers’ attitudes about informational books?
Submitted by:
Katerina Papadimitriou
Abstract:
Informational books, as a distinct kind of children’s books, give to children of very young age the chance to get in contact with scientific knowledge, academic language, complex syntactic forms, technical-special vocabulary, and various ways of meaning making. Informational books are usually referred to physical sciences, technology, engineering, art, and social life. The use of informational books in preschool education is very beneficial for children, because it gives them the chance to gain knowledge about the world around them, to expand their literacy experiences and to develop their critical and academic thinking. Regarding the above mentioned of informational books, teachers should use them as a strong tool to familiarize children with science, academic language, and multimodal ways of communicating the meaning of this kind of texts. However, recent research highlights that the time that preschool teachers choose to dispose to informational books reading is in comparison much less than this one to fiction books. In this paper we present a research on Greek preschool teachers’ attitudes about informational books and their use in their classrooms. Data were collected through in-depth interviews from 10 persons. The results indicated that the participants had a puzzlement regarding informational books and their use at kindergarten classrooms. They also reported that they were not familiar with informational books, they do not use them often as a source of knowledge in their classroom activities and they do not equip the children’s library at their classroom with this kind of books.
Papadimitriou Katerina, Phd Student
katerinalpap7@gmail.com
University of Patras,
E.S.E.C.E. (Department of Educational Sciences and Early Childhood Education)
Stellakis Nektarios, Associate Professor
nekstel@upatras.gr
University of Patras,
E.S.E.C.E. (Department of Educational Sciences and Early Childhood Education)