First Exposures to Fiction

I am stealing this topic from Dr. Burton's blog post.  Growing up, I had several favorite books that my parents read to me often as a young child; Goodnight Moon, Gulliver's Travels, Stellaluna, and Where the Wild Things Are were among my favorites.  These books mark the beginning stages of my direct exposure to fiction literature.

 

At a time when I was discovering the world, or rather my small, limited world of the time, my exposure to elements like tone, setting, and characters was crucial to my learning.  As a toddler, you don't have the opportunities to meet numerous new and interesting people of different cultures.  The same goes for exposure to places and different ways of life.  We all grew up in our own relative bubbles and our parents reading us these children's books is where we were first able to experience someone else's imagination.   

The literary element that I take the most from the above listed in the grand scheme is definitely tone.  I can still remember the feelings and impressions I felt when my parents read these books to me and they become familiar each time I re-read these books. Everyone owns their own evidences and reminders to childhood or any other memory/time for that matter and children's literature is often a part of that.