Fictionalised Non-fiction Picturebooks for Preschoolers: Children’s Responses to Imaginary Constructs in Designed Reading Activities

Abstract

Contemporary non-fiction picturebooks for children are often fictionalised in one way or another. Many non-fiction picturebooks for children are thus hybrids between fiction and non-fiction but labelled as non-fiction for children and presented to children as non-fiction. Their purpose is to inform and teach, and at the same time entertain and elicit affective responses. To succeed in achieving this dual purpose, this study assumes that designed teaching can create opportunities to separate combined depictions in fictionalised non-fiction. The purpose of this study is to explore children’s responses to imaginary constructs in designed reading activities, and to answer what opens up for children when combined depictions in fictionalised non-fiction are separated and made discernible. This is studied in four reading activities with a teacher and six five-year-olds in a preschool setting, reading and discussing picturebooks about dinosaurs and their extinction. The analysis shows that when combined depictions in fictionalised non-fiction are separated by contrast, and thus made discernible as established knowledge and imaginary constructs, this opens up for the children’s interpretation, appreciation, and creation of imaginary constructs.