Child

Biologically, a child (plural: children) is a human between the stages of birth and puberty. The legal definition of child generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority.

Child may also describe a relationship with a parent (such as sons and daughters of any age) or, metaphorically, an authority figure, or signify group membership in a clan, tribe, or religion; it can also signify being strongly affected by a specific time, place, or circumstance, as in "a child of nature" or "a child of the Sixties".

There are many social issues that affect children, such as childhood education, bullying, child poverty, dysfunctional families, child labor, and in developing countries, hunger. Children can be raised by parents, by fosterers, guardians or partially raised in a day care center.

Legal, biological, and social definitions

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines child as "a human being below the age of 18 years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier". This is ratified by 192 of 194 member countries. In U.S. Immigration Law, a child refers to anyone who is under the age of 21.

Book

A book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials, fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is a leaf, and each side of a leaf is a page. A set of text-filled or illustrated pages produced in electronic format is known as an electronic book, or e-book.

Books may also refer to works of literature, or a main division of such a work. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph, to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as magazines, journals or newspapers. The body of all written works including books is literature. In novels and sometimes other types of books (for example, biographies), a book may be divided into several large sections, also called books (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, and so on). An avid reader of books is a bibliophile or colloquially, bookworm.

A shop where books are bought and sold is a bookshop or bookstore. Books can also be borrowed from libraries. Google has estimated that as of 2010, approximately 130,000,000 unique titles had been published. In some wealthier nations, printed books are giving way to the usage of electronic or e-books, though sales of e-books declined in the first half of 2015.

David Shannon

David Shannon (born October 5, 1959) is an American writer and illustrator of children's books. Shannon grew up in Spokane, Washington. He graduated from the Art Center College of Design and now lives in Los Angeles. In 1998 he won the Caldecott Honor for his No, David!. He has also written A Bad Case of Stripes, How Georgie Radbourn Saved Baseball, and The Amazing Christmas Extravaganza. Shannon illustrated Audrey Wood's The Bunyans, various books by Jane Yolen including The Ballad of the Pirate Queens and Encounter, as well as Melinda Long's How I Became a Pirate and Pirates Don't Change Diapers.

Early life

David Shannon was born in Washington, D.C., but he also spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington. In an interview with Sonia Bolle in the Children's Literature Review (CLR), he said, "I loved Oliver Twist," but I liked the Artful Dodger more than Oliver. And I always thought the villains in Disney Movies were really cool." Shannon said that this fondness for villains made him realize as a child that "you need both sides for a good story."

The Three Little Pigs

The Three Little Pigs is a fable/fairy tale featuring anthropomorphic pigs who build three houses of different materials. A big bad wolf blows down the first two pigs' houses, made of straw and sticks respectively, but is unable to destroy the third pig's house, made of bricks. Printed versions date back to the 1840s, but the story itself is thought to be much older. The phrases used in the story, and the various morals drawn from it, have become embedded in Western culture.

It is a type 124 folktale in the Aarne–Thompson classification system.

Traditional versions

The Three Little Pigs was included in The Nursery Rhymes of England (London and New York, c.1886), by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps. The story in its arguably best-known form appeared in English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, first published in 1890 and crediting Halliwell as his source. The story begins with the title characters being sent out into the world by their mother, to "seek out their fortune". The first little pig builds a house of straw, but a wolf blows it down and eats him. The second pig builds a house of furze sticks, which the wolf also blows down and eats him. Each exchange between wolf and pig features ringing proverbial phrases, namely:

Children's literature

Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are enjoyed by children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader.

Children's literature can be traced to stories and songs, part of a wider oral tradition, that adults shared with children before publishing existed. The development of early children's literature, before printing was invented, is difficult to trace. Even after printing became widespread, many classic "children's" tales were originally created for adults and later adapted for a younger audience. Since the 15th century, a large quantity of literature, often with a moral or religious message, has been aimed specifically at children. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became known as the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as this period included the publication of many books acknowledged today as classics.

Introduction

There is no single or widely used definition of children's literature. It can be broadly defined as anything that children read or more specifically defined as fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or drama intended for and used by children and young people. Nancy Anderson, of the College of Education at the University of South Florida, defines children's literature as "all books written for children, excluding works such as comic books, joke books, cartoon books, and non-fiction works that are not intended to be read from front to back, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference materials".