Late Children Research Articles

The latest children’s literature in the context of developing ecological awareness

Treating the problem of climate security as particularly important in the education of children, in the article I present an analysis and interpretation of seventy books that appeared in the last decade of the 21st century on the Polish publishing market. In my opinion, these books can be described as particularly sensitive to the ecological condition of the contemporary world and humanity. Following the ideas of ecological humanities and numerous narratives about the Anthropocene, I divided the analysed books into seven thematic groups. As a result, I propose my own “Ekobiblioteczka” [en. “Ecolibrary”], which should be of interest to librarians in the first place. I consider it particularly helpful for parents, teachers, guardians and educators in the difficult and complex process of supporting the shaping of ecological awareness in younger school-age children. I pay attention to the value of the books indicated therein in terms of the child’s relationship with the natural environment. The above project is aimed at preparing future generations for conscious, creative and active participation in activities aimed at stopping the destruction of the natural environment, facilitating the transmission of the content of selected literary proposals for family and school education.

GCT-14. The Impact of Residual Disease on the Outcomes of Central Nervous System Germinomas – A Single Institution Experience

BACKGROUND: CNS Germinomas are highly radio-sensitive tumors with an excellent survival rate of more than 90%. The current standard of care combines chemotherapy with reduced-dose radiotherapy to minimize the adverse effects and long-term effects associated with radiotherapy. In the latest Children’s Oncology Group clinical trial (ACNS1123 stratum 2), patients with residual or progressive disease following chemotherapy can be considered for a “second-look” surgery to assess tumor viability. Patients with residual disease who do not undergo second-look surgery receive 24 Gy of whole ventricular radiation with a 12 Gy boost compared to 18 Gy plus boost given to patients in complete remission or without viable tumor on second-look. Conversely, the International Society of Paediatric Oncology (SIOP) protocol does not stratify based on response to chemotherapy, and the Korean SMC GCT trial uses 18 Gy CSI plus boost for all patients regardless of chemotherapy response. METHODS: Single center retrospective chart review of germinoma patients treated at St Louis Children’s Hospital between 2011 and 2021. RESULTS: We analyzed data for all 15 germinoma patients treated between 2011 and 2021. Five patients had residual disease following chemotherapy. Of these five, one had complete remission at the end of radiotherapy, one had partial response, and three had stable disease. All patients remain relapse-free with time of follow-up ranging between 6.3-109.3 months from the end of therapy (median 24 months). CONCLUSION: None of the five patients with residual disease following chemotherapy demonstrated disease progression following chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Future prospective clinical trials are needed in order to test the possibility of treating germinomas patients who have residual disease after chemotherapy with a low dose of radiotherapy similar to that used in patients with complete remission.

GCT-17. Recurrence of CNS germ cell tumors (GCTs) along biopsy and ventriculostomy tracts

Abstract BACKGROUND: Central nervous system (CNS) germinoma relapses are rare. However, the latest Children’s Oncology Group (COG), ACNS1123 stratum 2, described three relapses along the biopsy tract out of eight total relapses; two along the biopsy and endoscopic third ventriculostomy (ETV) tract and one along the biopsy tract and external ventricular drain. Given these findings, we sought to describe other cases of GCT recurrence along surgical tracts. METHODS: We performed a literature review from 1980-2021 to identify cases of GCT recurrence along biopsy and ventriculostomy tracts. RESULTS: Three patients with pineal lesions were identified (13, 14, and 34-years old). All underwent ETV, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) sampling, and tumor biopsy. Two patients had uncomplicated postoperative courses. One developed persistent hydrocephalus and underwent repeat ventriculostomy. Two were diagnosed with pure germinoma and treated with focal radiotherapy of 45 Gy alone or chemotherapy and radiation (50.4 Gy to the tumor volume and 36 Gy to adjacent high-risk area). The third was treated with methotrexate and corticosteroids. All three had recurrence on surveillance MRI (1-3 years after diagnosis). One had recurrence at the ventriculostomy bur hole site, and two had recurrence along the ventriculostomy tract. On biopsy, all three lesions were germinomas. One received pre-radiation chemotherapy and palliative radiation (36 Gy to surgical bed and 30.6 Gy to surrounding high-risk area). Another received chemotherapy and craniospinal radiation of 15 Gy. The third had a complicated post-biopsy course. He ultimately underwent chemotherapy and radiation (24 Gy). All were still alive at time of report. Two were disease free at 12 and 18 months, while one was still receiving chemotherapy. CONCLUSION: Recurrence along the biopsy or ventriculostomy tract is rarely reported in the literature. Future evaluation to determine the incidence could inform if biopsy and ventriculostomy tracts should be included in the radiation therapy field.

What's in a word?

In this special issue on communication, language and literacy, Helen Freeman talks about the 2021 Oxford Children's Word of the Year and shares some insight on Oxford's latest Children's Language Report, highlighting the role that early years practitioners can play to help children develop the vocabulary they need to thrive.

Unmet Need Cause Factors in Lampung Timur District

The problem of unmet need indicates a gap between the purpose of female reproduction and their perceptual behavior. This means that in one hand, women have a desire to avoid pregnancy; on the other hand, they do not take precautionary measures. Therefore, decrease on the percentage of the unmet need results on the significant number of contraception prevalence. Conversely, the high unmet need will be a problem for the government, not only causing the rapid increase in population but also affecting the high AKI (Maternal Mortality Rate).This research employed a descriptive method, describing the cause of Unfulfilled Pair Age (PUS) in the needs of family planning services in Eastern Lampung regency. As a consequence, all problems or causes of unmet need can be addressed by analyzing the data. For this study, research population has several criteria: first, mothers or married women who do not want to be pregnant again; second, they do not want to have another baby or they want to delay their pregnancy without using any contraception when data was collected. However, this study does not consider how many children they have, how old the latest child and the birth distance. The sample of this study was 336 people who are mothers or women in the status of unmet need. The findings suggest that factors for causing unmet need in East Lampung regency are caused by seven main factors and twelve specific factors. The seven factors are: first is the side effect of the use of contraceptive including obesity, bleeding and irregular menstrual cycles. Second is the cultural factor, including the desire to have male and female children. Third is wives’ perception including the impotent husband, fear of and away from their husband. Fourth is the health factor including, having high blood disease and cervical cancer and cysts. Fifth is the prohibition of husbands in the use of contraceptives. Sixth is religious and cultural prohibition such as considering the born babies is a gift from God, so there is no need to inhibit the birth. Seventh is behavioral factor such as laziness to use contraception.

Child Abuse - Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Child Protection

In Germany, the increasing focus on child abuse led to remarkable changes in recent years. The latest child protection laws (Kinderschutzgesetz, 2012) and the new medical guideline (AWMF S3+ Kinderschutzleitlinie, 2019) provide effective means for child protection services. Sound knowledge of the clinical manifestations, the parties involved, and the legal situation are required in order to provide effective child protection interventions. This article presents an update of the epidemiology, the legal situation, and the clinical manifestations concerning child abuse. With this information it foremost adresses medical professionals seeing children regularly without having a child protection team at disposal.

New Ofsted social care chief hails era of intelligence-led inspections

Yvette Stanley, Ofsted's new director of social care, says the latest children's services inspection framework focuses more on frontline social work practice and uses data analysis to identify emerging problems

어린이집 활동복 개발 연구 -아동 민속놀이 캐릭터를 활용하여-

The nursery active-wear uniform designs of Internet shopping malls are simple and similar; however, the latest children's wear trends (mostly composed of training jumpers and pants) do not reflect these qualities. Children's folklore plays (widely used in child education) have an instructive value for the emotional and intellectual development of a child. Nursery active-wear uniform designs applied to children's folklore's plays could be positive for the emotional development and specialized cultural education of children. We designed three nursery active-wear uniforms with three different design concepts (casual, semi-formal and sporty) regardless of sex. The main color of the three nursery active-wear uniforms was yellow. We used three different chroma and values of yellow through three design concepts: Design I of a nursery active-wear uniform (a training suit style with a good activity), Design II of a nursery active-wear uniform (a semi suit style), and Design III of a nursery active-wear uniform (a sportswear style that reflected a sport wear trend). We expressed children's folklore plays in the pattern of a nursery active-wear uniform. The pattern was characterized as a pair of bears flying kites. This pattern was utilized in three nursery active-wear uniforms with the logo and name of the nursery. We modified the designs of active-wear nursery uniforms based on an evaluation of 33 special panels. We made three nursery active-wear uniforms for five-year olds.

Book Reviews

Our reviewers discuss three of the latest children’s books to come off the press.

Book reviews

Our reviewers discuss three of the latest children’s books to come hot off the press.

Book reviews

Our reviewers discuss three of the latest children’s books to come hot off the press.

Symposium, and: Coleridge’s Laundry, and: A Brief History of English Romanticism

Symposium, and: Coleridge’s Laundry, and: A Brief History of English Romanticism Maxine Kumin (bio) Symposium Last call for the symposium at 4 p.m. to examine the works of W. H. Auden whom I remember always in carpet slippers. X from Hum. 101 will discuss the early poems, Y from Eng. 323 will discuss the later poems in the symposium that opens at 4 p.m. Spender famously said, Poor Auden; soonwe’ll have to take off his face and iron it to see who he is Perhaps he had bunions, thus the carpet slippers. [End Page 11] Lord Byron, Faustus, Yeats, September 11939, these poems should head the list of works discussed in the symposium at 4 p.m. which will reaffirm the poet’s place in the pantheon: wittier than Eliot, more readable than Pound, both too erudite to read in carpet slippers but knowing how all the instruments can disagree and cleverest hopes expire, let us revere his pleated face in the symposium at 4 p.m. while I revisit him on stage in carpet slippers. Coleridge’s Laundry I wanted to talk about Coleridge who was anything but handsome and was always leaving his wife to walk amazing distances for conversations with his pals: Poole, Lamb, Wordsworth, et al. I said, so what if the Pantisocratic ideal was just another hippie utopia where everyone labored by hand in the morning and studied or wrote in the afternoon? So what if the project conceived in poverty went down [End Page 12] in unexpected endowments, the Lannans and MacArthurs of their day? I wanted to read about laudanum: how many drops at bedtime and did he add them to water or tea or something stronger. When I closed my book I fell asleep as instantly as if I’d downed 50 drops in two fingers of scotch straight up. In my dream this poem was given a communion wafer and a blood transfusion. I woke with baked cotton on my tongue. My pulse was vigorous, my heart was with Sara, the mountain of laundry, her always absent Coleridge. Domesticity and migraines, miles and miles on foot. [End Page 13] A Brief History of English Romanticism How chaste was it? Does it matter? Did ever a poet have such a sister? It’s true that he gave her the ring to wear all day the day before his wedding which she didn’t attend for fear of drenching the ceremony with tears. For seven years she’d had him to herself, her only William, without a murmur she’d gone with him to settle his finances on “Mme Williams” who’d been his mistress, and the child he’d never seen, nine-year-old adorable Caroline. I love that they all bathed together that day, a make-believe family on the beach at Calais. And later, the rift with Coleridge, by then a goner— to think two men who’d been closer than blood brothers could break up over poetry and years go by in icy formalities. . . . Well, two of my brothers died unreconciled though neither was addicted, merely livid with rage at the other. At least Will and Sam closed lovingly despite the wrack of laudanum and even though Christabel, Part Two never got written and William’s few [End Page 14] late poems didn’t add much to his oeuvre nothing could detract from that first creative surge side by side those months in the Quantock hill and I’ll never forget how Coleridge walked 40 miles to meet Wordsworth, the very beginning of this story that leads us back into the title: A Brief History. . . . Maxine Kumin Maxine Kumin’s sixteenth poetry collection, Still to Mow, is available from W. W. Norton. Her latest children’s book, Mites to Mastodons, is available from Houghton Mifflin. She has been the recipient of the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly poetry prizes, the Poet’s Prize, and the Robert Frost Medal. She and her husband live on a farm in Warner, New Hampshire. Copyright © 2007 University of Nebraska Press

The Lonesome Boy Theme as Emblem for Arna Bontemps's Children's Literature

In a letter dated March 2, 1955, Langston Hughes wrote his longtime friend Arna Bontemps to congratulate him on the publication of Bontemps's latest children's book: Boy is a perfectly charming and unusual book. I read it right off[;] it came in the mail today. I LOVE books that short and easy and pretty to read. It ought to make a wonderful gift (Nichols 330). Bontemps himself had written Hughes about the book a little more than a year earlier (on December 10, 1953): This is the book I enjoyed writing, perhaps because I did it impulsively for myself, while editors hounded me for my misdeeds and threatened me if I did not deliver manuscripts I had contracted for. So I closed the door for two days and had myself a time (Nichols 319). Another, perhaps more valid, reason he wrote this particular story about Bubber, a boy so lonesome he plays his trumpet whenever and wherever he can - ending up, as his grandfather subsequently explains, at a devil's ball - stems from Bontemps's own nostalgic feelings about his Louisiana heritage and, more specifically, about his own sense of being a lonesome boy. careful look at Bontemps's work shows the lonesome boy theme appearing over several years and in different forms. For example, Bontemps wrote a version of the story, Boy, Silver Trumpet, in the 1930s, but it was not published until his collection of short fiction Old South: A Summer Tragedy and Other Stories of the Thirties appeared a few weeks after his death in 1973. And on May 5, 1966, he delivered a speech at the New York Public Library which was published in December of that year as The Lonesome Boy Theme in Horn Book magazine. There, he states that he has often used the theme, particularly to reflect on himself, since he began writing fiction: With me the lonesome-boy theme has persisted. Consciously or unconsciously, it too reflects influences. I used to avoid the first[-]person[-]singular in my writing; for some reason or other it embarrassed me. But despite my efforts - despite careful stratagems - I am afraid I did not always avoid autobiography. Born in Louisiana, carried by my parents to California at a very early age, I suspect that it is myself I see as I look back in each of the guises in which the lonesome boy has appeared since I introduced him in God Sends Sunday, my first book. (674) Bontemps's use of the lonesome boy theme applies mainly to his children's literature, even though he clearly wrote God Sends Sunday for adult audiences. While it would be facile to claim that all of his works - either for adults or children - reveal this autobiographical theme, his use of the theme suggests a reason behind the author's interest in writing for the young. close examination of Bontemps's Lonesome Boy, therefore, can help explain his motivation to become one of the first authors of the twentieth century to write books for young African Americans. It can also explain some of his disillusionment with adult books and with the economics of the publishing world, which was still dominated by white publishers and white readers during the 1930s, even though the Harlem Renaissance would usher in permanent change. Bontemps, at least temporarily, was shown to a bad seat during the 1930s. All three of his adult novels - God Sends Sunday (1931), Black Thunder (1936), and Drums at Dusk (1939) - appeared during the Great Depression; none sold well. And even though he proposed several other novels and wrote at least one full-length, unpublished novel between 1939 and 1973, when he died, he did not publish an adult novel after Drums at Dusk. Chariot in the Sky (1951), Bontemps's semi-fictional account of the famous Fisk University Jubilee Singers, straddles the line between adolescent and adult material, although it was published as a book for older adolescents. As we shall see, economics as well as politics and autobiographical impulses motivated Bontemps to write for juvenile readers. …

American Childhood: Essays on Children's Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

In this collection of fourteen essays, Anne Scott MacLeod locates and describes shifts in the American concept of childhood as those changes are suggested in nearly two centuries of children's stories. A social historian and literary critic of genuine insight, MacLeod has helped to pioneer an approach to American culture through the children's literature that arises from it: When read books written for children, MacLeod comments in her preface, I look for author's views, certainly, but also try to discover what the culture is saying about itself, about the present and the future, and about the nature and purposes of childhood....Children's books don't mirror their culture, but they do always, no matter how indirectly, convey some of its central truths. Most of the essays concern domestic novels for children - stories set more or less in the time of their publication and meant for adolescent and teen readers. Some essays also draw creatively on childhood memoirs, travel writings that contain foreigners' observations of American children, and other studies of children's literature. MacLeod looks beyond the books to their unwritten subtexts - to the interplay between writers' adherence to conventions, their own memories of youth, and their adult concerns. She probes as well the tension between the literal, superficial images and themes of the stories and the realities of the surrounding culture. Beading across historical periods, MacLeod traces changes in our attitudes toward children and shows how they have paralleled or departed from the characteristic tone of each era. The topics on which she writes range from the recently politicized marketplace for children's books to thereestablishment (and reconfiguration) of the family in the latest children's fiction to the ways that literature challenges or enforces the idealization of children. MacLeod sometimes considers a single author's canon, as when she discusses the feminism of the Nancy Drew mystery seri

Times Past, Joys Present

Times Past, Joys Present Geraldine Cleary Nichols (bio) Sólo un pie descalzo, by Ana María Matute. Illustrated by Hugo Figueroa. Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1983. Distributed in the United States by the Spanish Book Corporation, 610 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10020. Ana María Matute (b. 1926) is among the three or four best and most widely known writers of fiction in post-Civil War Spain, and she has won all the important literary prizes in her country; her adult works have also been translated into every major Eastern and Western European language. She is known principally for her adult Fiction (eight novels and seven short-story collections to date), unique in postwar Spanish literature by virtue of its lyricism and its persistent yet delicate focus on children. This corpus has been studied extensively in European and American university circles and has won her inclusion in the limited canon prescribed by the Educational Testing Service for its advanced placement test in Spanish. Like several other well-known women novelists in Spain (Concha Alós, Carmen Martín Gaite, Dolores Medio, Ana María Moix), Matute has also written fiction for children. While her children's fiction (three novels and five short stories) has received little attention from academic critics, its popular reception has been enthusiastic, both within Spain and without, as we can gauge from the multiple editions and translations it has enjoyed. Through 1978 (the latest figures available), Paulina, el mundo y las estrellas (1960; Paulina: The World and the Stars) had four printings in Spain and had been translated and published in France, the Ukraine, West Germany, Holland, Iran, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary; "Elsaltamontes verde" (1961; The Green Grasshopper), five printings in Spain, translations in France, West Germany, Portugal, and Japan; El polizón del "Ulises" (1964; The Cabin Boy of the "Ulysses"), five [End Page 174] printings in Spain, translations in West and East Germany, Russia, Poland, Japan, Sweden, Italy, and Czechoslovakia. Astonishingly, her works for children are only now beginning to appear in English. Michael Doyle of the University of New Orleans has translated several stories, one of which, "The Boys," appears in this volume. In 1984, Matute was awarded Spain's Premio Nacional de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil (National Prize for Children's and Young People's Literature) for her latest children's work, Sólo un pie descalzo (Just One Bare Foot). Perhaps the receipt of this prestigious award will at last convince an English-language publisher of her importance. Solo un pie descalzo is a short novel for older children. It relates the adventures of an imaginative young girl named Gabriela, "who often used to lose one shoe. Just one, never both of them" (1; all translations are mine). The first chapter describes her preschool years, the second her first year in school, and the remainder her tenth year, a magical time of flowering and change. In Matute's descriptions of her, as well as in the engaging, slightly naive drawings of Hugo Figueroa that accompany the text, Gabriela bears a marked and surely not accidental likeness to Lewis Carroll's Alice. The adventures of both girls are entirely imaginative and revolve, in great measure, about the domestic or social spheres—fantastically transformed, to be sure, but still recognizable—which little girls of their privileged social class have been in training to occupy since modern (capitalist and patriarchal) times began. Whereas in her adult novels Matute criticizes the classist and sexist upbringing inflicted on her generation, in Sólo she is less concerned with society at large and more focused on the adaptive problems of an "odd (wo)man out." The resulting lack of explicit criticism of Spain's discriminatory social system may disappoint readers who prefer their children's literature to take sides on every current social issue. Like Alice, Gabriela finally returns from her imaginary journeys quite "cured" of her eccentricities and ready to settle into her place in the adult world. Her "excessive" imagination has been brought under control, so she is able to behave more like her siblings, and they stop teasing her. Less absorbed by her own inner voices, she is able to comprehend the heretofore...

Pregnancy, Birth and Family Planning, by Alan F. Guttmacher, M.D. New York: New American Library, Signet Books, 1973, 392 pp., $1.50 (paperbound)

First published in 1937, this book has been repeatedly extended, revised, and re-issued under new titles. In his brief Foreword, the author writes: "Pregnancy, Birth and Family Planning is the latest child of this rather extended book-bearing succession. To be sure it resembles its siblings, but there are striking differences, largely modernizations. The decade since 1962 has witnessed some remarkable advances-some scientific, others socio-medical-in Obstetrics." These advances, and the solid principles of obstetrics upon which they are based, are presented here with just the right mixture of authority and familiarity for the lay-but always inquisitive -audience addressed.

Rebuilding Birkbeck College

IN the murky atmosphere of a Strand tavern on a dreary December evening more than a century ago, the germ of a great ideal first struggled into existence. George Birkbeck, who presided on the occasion, was a man of vision, but it is to be doubted whether even he had more than a glimmering of what the future held for his latest child. Since that night? the gathering of a couple of thousand working men did not disperse until 3 a.m.?Birkbeck College has become an integral part of the body scientific. The appeal launched at the Mansion House on November 7 for funds for rebuilding Birkbeck College is of the highest importance not only to the College alumni but also to scientific workers throughout Great Britain. The Lord Mayor (Sir Stephen Killick), an old student of the College, presided, supported by the Duke of York, president of the College, accompanied by the Duchess, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of London (Dr. Eason) and the chairman of the Governing Body (Mr. W. L. Hichens). Owing to the general election, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, another old student, was unable to attend, but wrote a letter strongly supporting the appeal.