Preschool has a long tradition of using picture books, both as entertainment and as a resource for educational activities. In science there are two main application areas. The first one is science concepts and the second is to teach basic science process skills. These skills, observing, communicating, inferring, classifying, measuring and predicting reflects the methods used by scientists. Picture books potential to put science concepts and activities that promote the use of science process skills in a meaningful context, recommends using picture books for this purpose.

The aim of the study was to examine the reading ability of adultswith intellectual and/or communicative disabilities. The group adults withintellectual and/or communicative disabilities consisted of 66 individuals.One control group consisting of 36 children aged 7 to 12 years and onereference group consisting of 14 adults were used. Participants were given anumber of language and reading related tests. Adults with intellectual and/orcommunicative disabilities had significantly lower results than the adultreference group regarding all tests and significantly lower results than thechild control group regarding phonological processing. There was nodifference between adults with intellectual and/or communicative disabilitiesand the child comparison group regarding word decoding and readingcomprehension.

This thesis presents and evaluates a project, undertaken in 2001 by a librarian the writer of this thesis and a teacher. We met with a number of adults with reading and writing disabilities, and presented and discussed books and experiences of reading, with the aim to increase their joy of reading, as well as finding out more about our own ways of co-operating with each other across our professional borders. The documentation and evaluation emphasizes on the process and the results of the project, and on our own participation, by asking the following questions: How did we carry out the project? What obstacles did we meet? What went well/wrong? What did we achieve related to our goals? In order to illuminate the project from different angles, consequences of reading and writing disabilities for adults are discussed, as well as the specific nature of adult education and projects more or less related to ours. Action research is chosen as a method, because it allows the process of the project, and our own learning process, to be exposed.

The main purpose of this study was to collect norm data for thegrammatical receptive language test Test for Reception of Grammar - Version 2(TROG-2), from 144 Swedish children, aged 8:0-9:11 years. Another aim was toinvestigate whether a change in the order of the blocks was needed in the Swedishversion of TROG-2 to keep an increasing level of difficulty. Other aims included toinvestigate the relationship between receptive grammar and word decoding, andbetween parents ratings of their children?s language comprehension and readingabilities and the children?s results on the TROG-2 and a word decoding test. Theresults showed that the order of the blocks needs to be changed and that there wasno significant relationship between language comprehension and word decoding.Parents were better at rating their children?s reading than language comprehension..

In Montessori pre-schools early reading and writing is an important feature. By tracing sandpaper letters with their fingers and voicing the sound simultaneously the children connect phonemes to graphemes and normally learn to write between the ages of four and five. 24 sixyear old children who attended Montessori pre-school and 26 six-year old children who had not attended Montessori school were assessed with a test assessing their linguistic awareness.The result showed that the Montessori children were more linguistically aware than the children who hadn?t received any literacy training. The scores of the Montessori children were highest on phonological awareness.

Do the principals who have the pedagogical responsibility of the school find reading comprehension important? This is the underpinning of my thesis for the special teacher-training program. The survey was conducted through interviews with two principals. The results show that they believe reading comprehension is important but it has not been given priority in the organization. The essay could form the basis for further research into reading habits, home environment influences and other factors that may contribute to improve reading comprehension performance..

The purpose of this essay is to look at how the depiction of cats is performed in childrens? picture books. I will analyze eight pictures from four different books, two from each. The books are from two different decades: from the 1960s and from the 2000s.My ambition is to see if there are any artistic or cultural differences when comparing the two decades? depictions of cats to each other.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how opinions and values are expressed in BTJ?s reviews of children?s literature. According to debates reviewed and interviewed librarians, many consider BTJ to be too directing when it comes to the libraries? purchases of books. Therefore I find it important to study how the reviews are written.

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how people from Iran experience reading in their mother tongue, Persian, compared to how they experience reading in Swedish and if there was a difference. The questions to be answered in the thesis were: What is the dominant purpose when people read their mother tongue and when they read in Swedish. Do they read because they need information, because they want to relax or do they, when they read, reflect on their own lives? The method was qualitative, interviews were conducted with 8 Iranians living in Sweden. The theoretical background consists of a description of theories on reading and theories on language and identity.

My thesis is a study of how the perception of booktalk aimed at kids and youngsters in the Swedish educational system has changed between 1932 and 2007. A discursive reading of articles in the magazine Biblioteksbladet provides the basis for my investigation. The thesis argues that an older "authoritaritan" and "traditional" discourse has given way for a more modern, "anti-authoritaritan" and "lust"-directed discourse. The older discourse was designed to make sure that young people were provided with a certain well-defined quantity of "approved" literature. The new discourse stresses the importance of fostering kids and youngsters with a positive and enthusiastic attitude towards reading in general.

The purpose of this study was to identify reading strategies used by high school students when reading textbooks and school-related material. Any differences in reading strategies between Biology and English were also of importance. A study sample of 62 students from three different high schools in Sweden participated in the study and were asked to fill out a survey questionnaire. Eight students from this sample were also interviewed. The findings of this study show that students use a number of different reading strategies of which metacognitive and sociocultural factors play a crucial part.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine children's communication and interaction during story time at the public library. The aim is also to examine how to develop the story time ? in terms of participation and equality ? at a specific library.Action research was used as a research strategy and participant observation, log, tutoring and interviews as methods to collect data. Since action research is done on the basis of practice, a significant collaboration with the librarian and the participant children is taking place within this study.Research from the fields of Library and Information Science, Education and Childhood Sociology form the interdisciplinary research area to which this study links. The theoretical framework consists of theory and concepts from the Socio-cultural Perspective, Poststrucuralist Feminism and Childhood Sociology.

Uppsatsens övergripande syfte var att undersöka eventuella skillnader och likheter mellan elever i årskurs 4 resp. årskurs 6 med avseende på läsförståelsen. För att mäta läsförståelsen användes ett välbeprövat läsförståelsetest. Syftet var också att beskriva hur lärare, med ansvar för läs- och skrivutvecklingen i respektive klass, arbetar med läsning och för att stimulera läsförståelsen hos sina elever. För att ta reda på hur lärarna arbetar besvarades en enkät.

The purpose of this study is to understand how the school manages to question norms, and in doing so might prevent its students from being subjected to discrimination and other degrading treatment. This has been done with a focus on how gender related norms are represented, reproduced and questioned in children?s fictional literature. Two methods have been used; a survey and an literary analysis. The survey was conducted on primary school teachers with the intent to collect information related to their thoughts when choosing books to use in their classrooms, and also to source commonly used fiction.

The aim of this study was to examine how children in the age of 5 are communicating in play at the preschool and how their fantasy games are different from each other. In this study, I have gained a greater insight on how to control children's imagination games.My approach has been the observation of three fun times where I also used me out of a voice recorder to record children's voices when their children are communicating with each other during the time of play at the preschool.The results of my study showed that children's fantasy games based on children's past experiences in which children use different themes and characters. The children's communication activities are different from each other. Children have different themes but the deck is based on imagination and communication.Fantasy games that children perform is rooted in the experiences that children get through to experience and see the reality.