Product Review

The author draws on his own extensive research in urban classrooms to present a comprehensive, grounded theoretical model of children s understanding of picture storybooks the first to focus specifically on young children. Advancing a much broader and deeper theory of literary understanding, the author suggests that children respond in five different ways during picture storybook readalouds; that these responses reveal that children are engaged in different types of literary meaning-making; and that these types of meaning-making are examples of five foundational aspects of literary understanding.