Children's Literature ENGL 2330

Vivian Guest

ENGL 2330/Kilpatick

Reflective Essay

Children’s Literature 

I want to be a writer, but I never considered writing for children. But I stumbled upon this course and decided to take it this semester. It has been wonderful and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The world of writing books is a vast one, and it is all to easy to find a little corner you fit into and stay there without needing to look over the edges too often. The biggest thing I learned in this course was that writing for children is its own vast world, with just as many corners. Genre and age group, entertainment and education, reality and fiction, all their own thing. A lot of students in the class were going into education, something I have no interest in pursuing, yet I learned a lot from the parts of the course that were geared toward using children’s literature in education. It is very informative to see how a book could be used in the class room once you have written it. 

Many things in this course were not new to me. There has never been a doubt in my mind as to the literary value of children’s literature. Books have been an important part of my life and I  have known the impact they can have first hand. This knowledge was expanded and broadened by this course, and in some ways honed. I now know how to present a book to someone else in such as way as to help them feel the full impact a book can have. The service learning project was particularly useful in learning this, as I had to write up lesson plans to go along with a book, thinking of ways to engage the children beyond what was on the surface of the story.

When it came time to pick my final project it was really a no brainer, I would attempt to write a children’s picture book. The hardest part for me was the research aspect of the project. “Research?” I thought. “I’m writing a book, what is there to research?” I soon found out there was plenty to research, even for a picture book that had little point beyond entertainment. That was where I started. There is a lot to be said about entertainment and the value of it. It also soon became clear that I would need to work with an illustrator and the collaborative efforts involved in that fascinated me, so I began to study that as well. There was also the publication process and requirements and considerations. But perhaps the most important thing for me to learn was that I could do the research that was required and it was not nearly as scary or pointless as I originally thought. I like the way my story turned out and enjoyed the project and the course as a whole. 

Book and Power Point