AimThe Swedish government has allocated a milliard Swedish Crowns on the project ?Ett handslag med idrotten?, (A handshake with sports), to make it possible for more children to participate in sports. The project goes on for four years and my work is an evaluation of the projects that have received fundings from Gästriklans Idrottsförbund for the second year. One aim is to see how many pupils that have been involved with the projects and especially the numbers of pupils earlier not active in a sport club and the number of girls. It is interesting to see what?s in common in the sport clubs that have had a large number from those two groups.

This essay deals with the issue of children and stress, and the impact that stress can have on children. The purpose has been to explore how I, in my role as teacher, can prevent children from developing stress in preschool, and how I can prevent stress to develop inside of my own department. My essay is structured as follows: First, I describe my practical work with children. Then I analyze some research literature on stress, and finally I reflect over what I have described earlier and try to connect the practical with the theoretical.In the practical part of this essay I describe the various events that I have observed during my work in preschool, where I have seen how stress can affect both children and teachers. Then I describe how the increasing size of children?s groups can create stress because of the noisy environment of the department.

In this thesis the positioning of children and adults in the context of children?s rights in SouthAfrica and Sweden are examined. With theoretical terms as children in vulnerability and adults incharge the analysis examines how South Africa and Sweden has been using the UN children?sconvention to empower children and for what consequences in the positioning of children that hasshown. And that adults are positioned as a powerful group with a responsibilty of protectingchildren.

In Sweden over 10.000 patients annually, mostly children, undergo tonsillar surgery. The most common surgical method is total removal of the tonsil, tonsillectomy (TE). During the last decade partial tonsil resection, tonsillotomy (TT), has been reintroduced and is associated with lower primary morbidity and less postoperative pain. The aim of the present study was to evaluate if and to what extent 4-5 year old children?s voice function are affected by tonsillar hypertrophy compared to controls and to study the effects of the two surgical techniques on vocal function.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the impact of learning on open-field activity among pre-school children varying from 3 to 5 years old. Altogether 25 children, 13 girls and 12 boys, entered the test from three different preschools in Dalarna. Six of these children represented the control group. The children were asked to learn 2 tasks, 1 visual memory task and 1 spatial constructing-kit task. Before, between and after the tasks, the children were allowed to move freely in the open field.

The purpose of this essay is to shed some light upon the children who grew up in Sweden after their parents fled the war in former Yugoslavia. Did the parents spread their own opinions about the other ethnicities which they fought against in the war to the children, even though they live in a new country? And if so, was it an act of patriotism for the country they once lived in and who was to blame for the war? Did the children who grew up in Sweden share the same attitudes as their parents? To find out about this we used interviews with four people, all with heritage from former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Croatia. What we found out was that the thoughts from the parents partially were passed down to their children, even though the children thought that they had formed their own opinions. In this case the thoughts didn?t relate to any kind of patriotism or who to blame for the war, they rather believed that they shouldn?t blame the other ethnic groups for the war.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how children experience librarians, their knowledge, assignments and appearance. The children?s thoughts about libraries and librarians in general are also studied. Empirical data has been collected by interviewing children aged 8-12 years old. The method used is qualitative interviews performed individually, in pairs and groups.

Lip force has been found to affect the ability to achieve satisfying speech production and swallowing. A normative value for lip force in adults has been measured to 15 Newton (N). Corresponding value for children measured with Lip Force Meter 100 (LF100) does not exist. In the current study lip force was measured in children between the ages of five and ten years. The aim of the study was to obtain normative values for children with typical development in separate age groups.

The present study examines in a longitudinal perspective earlyspeech development in children with partial isolated cleft palate comparedwith children with unilateral cleft lip and palate and children with typicaldevelopment. The groups were compared regarding consonant production at18 months, 3 and 5 years. The results showed that speech development inchildren with isolated cleft palate did not differ significantly from that inchildren with typical development except for production of oral fricatives at18 months. The children with unilateral cleft lip and palate had significantlymore speech deviations at all ages. The children in both cleft palate groupshad significantly higher hearing thresholds at all ages.

The aim of the study is to show how children and adults are described in three picture books, examining how children and adults are portrayed in text-and-picture narrative and how this has changed over time. We have analysed how the characters in the books are presented and how the representation of children and adults has changed in our own times.The material for the study consists of three picture books from different periods, with the focus on how children and adults are described as the common point of departure. The analysed picture books are: Tomtebobarnen (Beskow 1919), Aja baja, Alfons Åberg! (Bergström 1972) and Snäll (Dahle 2008).We have arrived at the conclusion that a text-and-picture narrative is in very large measure a reflection of the outlook on children, childhood and child rearing at the time when the book was published. The result shows that the greatest change that has happened is that parents? and adults? dominance in the books has declined over the years, and that children have been given a more prominent role.

This master thesis is based on the sociocultural perspective. A qualitative research study was conducted to investigate children's attitudes towards reading, texts and libraries.The theoretical background is constituted by ideas from the new sociology of childhood, literacy-studies and reader-response theory.The study was conducted with 23 children, 13 girls and 10 boys, participating in focus groups.The results of the study reveal that children's literacy-activities in school are strongly influenced and limited by adults. Children's interest in pictures and non-fiction-reading do not correspond to the school institution that favors traditional media and fiction. The study also reveals a gender division between children's literacy-activities that tends to grow with age. All the children in the study regard libraries as book-houses and wished for libraries that combine activity and serenity.The thesis shows the importance of being aware of, and engage in, children's reading-interests and reading-practices if the reading stimulating activities in schools and libraries are to be successful.

AbstractThe purpose with the study is to contribute knowledge of teacher?s thoughts of, and actions in potentially stress filled situations at preschool. The methods I?ve been using are qualitative interviews and unstructured observations of hallway situation at dressing and the transit between lunch and rest.At the interviews with the teachers it showed that none of them feels stressed but there are stress filled situations. The lunch and transit between lunch and rest is a stressful situation, where there is a lot to do, like the dishes, the teachers break and the lie-down.

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.

The present study investigated free narratives in 72 children between 3;11 and 9;0 years. Participants were recruited from a multilingual environment in eastern Gothenburg. The children were instructed to make up their own stories after being provided with openings, ?Story stems?. The stories were then transcribed and analyzed on micro- and macro level and narrative evaluation.

This master thesis is based on the sociocultural perspective. A qualitative research study was conducted to investigate children's attitudes towards reading, texts and libraries.The theoretical background is constituted by ideas from the new sociology of childhood, literacy-studies and reader-response theory.The study was conducted with 23 children, 13 girls and 10 boys, participating in focus groups.The results of the study reveal that children's literacy-activities in school are strongly influenced and limited by adults. Children's interest in pictures and non-fiction-reading do not correspond to the school institution that favors traditional media and fiction. The study also reveals a gender division between children's literacy-activities that tends to grow with age. All the children in the study regard libraries as book-houses and wished for libraries that combine activity and serenity.The thesis shows the importance of being aware of, and engage in, children's reading-interests and reading-practices if the reading stimulating activities in schools and libraries are to be successful.