Browsing by Subject "children’s literature"

The traditional nuclear family is the most common type of family in our society. During the last decades other kinds of family models have appeared besides the nuclear family. Every child comes across with the diversity of families at some part of their lives. It will happen during their lives or when they start the early childhood education and school. Children should know how to meet the diversity and grow to understand it so that everyone would feel themselves appreciated. Children's books can be a tool to handle diversity of families with children. Through children's books, a child can observe different kinds of families and their lives from a reasonable distance. From a book, the child can find objects to identify to. The child also learns to understand his/her own family as well as other kinds of families. All this widens up the child's picture of the world and teaches how to tolerate dissimilarity. The goal of this research was to find out what kind of families can be found from the popular children's book series Risto Räppääjä, and how the families are represented in it. Another goal was to reflect how educators could use the series in preschool and in elementary school while discussing about diversity of families. The research also tries to broaden the impressions of parents and other educators towards how children's literature can be used variedly when teaching children liberality and how to be a member of the society who accepts dissimilarity. This research was qualitative. The research method was content analysis, where fictional documents were analyzed. The documents were 13 books from a children's book series Risto Räppääjä. Many kinds of families were found from the children's book series Risto Räppääjä. The extended family Räppääjä and nuclear family Perhonen were the most relevant families in this research. These two families broke many of the stereotypes that are placed towards families. Children's points of view and thoughts about families in general also surface from these two families. An adult reader and a child reader find opportunities to reflect the families to their own lives and consider their attitudes through these two families. Also through all the families in the series reader will learn different kinds of ways of living. The children's book series Risto Räppääjä can be used in many ways in preschool and elementary school, for example in conversations, drama and artwork.