Out & About With Poh By Ann Braybrooks

As children grow, it is important to find materials that correspond to their growth in multiple areas in order to strengthen and further their development. Perhaps one of the best tools for accomplishing this task is books, which can be used to strengthen a child’s cognition, language, and understanding of the world around them. One such example is A Wonderful Wind from Disney’s “Out & About with Pooh: A Grow and Learn Library.” This book was written by Ann Braybrooks and demonstrates how a book, when written with appropriate developmental steps in mind, can be an excellent tool for helping children ages five to seven learn and develop in the physical, cognitive, social, and emotional domains.
Before one even begins reading the story, the
construction of the book serves as the first developmentally appropriate feature of A Wonderful Wind. The book has a hard cover with standard paper pages that require a reader to use precise finger movements to turn the page. According to the Proximodistal Principle, children in the five to seven year old age range should be completing their fine motor development. This development begins in a child’s core as gross motor skills, then further develops into fine motor skills in their extremities, which include use of precise finger movements (Siegler & DeLoache & Eisenberg & Saffran, 2014).While a younger reader may exercise the ulnar grasp by using their whole hand to swipe at pages that need to be turned, a child who is five to seven years old has developed full use of their fingers is able to reach for the corner of the book and gently separate the paper pages of A Wonderful Wind. As a child begins to read the story, they will notice the book uses large pictures with one to two sentences on each page. This focus on pictures is an important part of making the book appropriate for the five to seven year old child’s cognitive development. According to Piaget, children in this age range are in the preoperational stage of cognitive development. This means that children have mastered the idea that a symbol can be representative of something in the real world. (Siegler et al., 2014) In A Wonderful Wind, the pictures on the page act as symbols that correspond to what the text says is happening in the story. This provides children with an opportunity to use the pictures as clues for the meaning of challenge words that may be included in the text, or as indicators of what may happen next. By asking a child to look at pictures to make predictions about what may happen, a caregiver is encouraging the development and practice of systematic thinking. Though systematic thinking is not fully mastered until the next stage of cognitive development, the concrete operational stage, encouraging the child to begin exercising systematic thinking can help provide the foundational tools they will need to make achievements as they move into the next stage. The story itself also serves as a basis for helping children to overcome the limitations of their thinking while they are in the preoperational stage of cognitive development.
Children who are in this stage of development struggle with logical thinking because of their use of centration. By focusing on only one aspect of a situation, children fail to notice other important features that could be key to understanding what they see. In the story, Piglet has a fear of wind because it is loud and causes him to have nightmare (Braybrooks, 1996). In this situation, Piglet exercises centration by only focusing on one factor of the wind. As the story unfolds, Piglet’s friends help him to see that wind can do other things besides be loud and scary by showing him fun activities that require wind. By the end of the story, Piglet is able to consider multiple qualities of wind, and understands that it does not have to be scary. This story line helps to encourage children to look at situations from multiple perspectives, and challenges their cognitive limitation in the area of centration. Though preoperational children cannot be expected to overcome this challenge entirely until they have moved into the concrete operational stage, encouraging children to grow in this area will help them to prepare for success as they move on to the next
stage.
The content itself also helps children with their development in the emotional and social domains as they learn to regulate their expression of feelings. From the beginning of the story, readers are aware that Piglet is experiencing fear because it is a windy day and he is afraid of wind, yet as the day goes on he chooses to internalize his fear because his friends want to engage in fun windy day activities (Braybrooks, 1996). This models for five to seven year old children the idea that having control over one’s emotions has social consequences. Had Piglet chosen to externalize his fear, he would not have had the opportunity to spend time with his friends. Children reading this story may recognize that Piglet was better off for controlling his fear of wind, especially as he came to a new understanding of wind at the end of the story. As children within this age range enter school and form new social relationships that play an increasingly important in their life, children undergoing their own emotional struggles may be able to recall the story and recognize that just like Piglet, controlling their expression of emotions in certain scenarios may result in a positive social outcome.
Though the content of the story is significantly important in aiding five to seven year old children’s development in the cognitive, social, and emotional domains, these benefits would be lost were it not for the age appropriate manner in which the content is presented.
The book caters its language and sentence complexity to beginning readers in the five to seven year age range. By age five or six, children can be expected to demonstrate phonological competence in the language development (Siegler et al., 2014). This means that they are capable of making all sounds needed to pronounce words in the English language. Understanding this, the author uses words that include a wide variety of phonemes, including more challenging sounds like the “th” in “there” or the “sh” sound in “reassuringly” (Braybrooks, 1996). By this stage of development, children should have mastered these sounds, and should be capable of producing them when they are confronted in the
book.
Similarly, the book facilitates the development of language in the area of grammar by narrating in the past tense. By the age of five, children are capable of using morphemes as suffixes to indicate verb tense, however they are not expected to master the past tense completely until the age of seven. Because there are many exceptions to the rules of past tense conjugation, children between five and seven are prone to grammatical errors caused by overuse of the suffix “-ed” (Siegler et al., 2014). By narrating in the past tense, the book provides an opportunity for children ages five to seven to be exposed to exceptions of the past tense rules like “blew,” “sat,” and “saw” and consequently make amendments to their understanding of grammar. (Braybrooks, 1996)
Because it would be difficult for a child to make meaningful connections to language development if they had lost interest in the book, A Wonderful Wind caters to the expected attention span of a five to seven year old. The Information Processing theory describes the development of attention as increasing with age. This means that while a three and a half year old may only have an attention span of eight seconds, a five to seven year old can focus on an object like a book for a longer period of time. (Siegler et al., 2014) The creators of this book arranged the pages so that there were only one to three sentences on each page. The amount of time it would take to read this is long enough that children ages five to seven can stretch their attention span by exercising the conscious control of attention that they are expected to possess by age six. Yet, the time needed to read just a few sentences is also short enough that they will be able to turn the page and see a new series of pictures and text that will retain their interest. To read the book in its entirety takes an adult about five minutes, so even with a new reader’s slower pace, reading A Wonderful Wind is not a lengthy undertaking, so children between the ages of five and seven should find themselves engaged and interested for the entire story.
At the same time, sentence length corresponds to the Information Processing Theory’s idea of working memory. Working memory is used to store and process input a child receives, in this case from the book (Siegler et al., 2014). Though the sentences are varied in length, the sentences are not excessively long in order to accommodate for the limited working memory capacity of a five to seven year old. Even longer sentences include commas to indicate pauses that allow a child to stop and consider what has been said thus far. As children read the sentences of the book, they must exercise working memory to remember which words were used in the sentence and also how to process those words to comprehend what was being said. Because working memory grows with age, a five to seven year old could balance storage and processing for longer sentences, like those included in A Wonderful Wind, as opposed to a three or four year old, who might only be able to sufficiently comprehend a four or five word sentence.
Overall, A Wonderful Wind provides excellent support for children ages five to seven across the board as they develop. By considering the child’s physical, social, emotional, and cognitive abilities, the author puts scientifically backed research and theories into practice by calling on children to use skills that they already possess, and encouraging them to practice skills that will help them to transition to the next stage of development.