Your second paper in this course will be due Thursday, December 11.  It should be 4-6 TYPED (or computer-printed) pages in length.  Hand-written papers will not be accepted.

     For this paper, you are to read two (2) pieces of criticism about ONE of the books we are reading in the course.  To find this criticism, use the MLA Bibliography which is available on CD-ROM at the NSU library.  You can search the bibliography using an author's name, a book title, or a topic heading; it will give you most articles and books that have been published in which your search term appears.  NOTE: Be sure to use topic headings as well as names and titles.  You may find useful information about Winnie-the-Pooh in "topical" books such as Lois Kuznets's When Toys Come Alive or Margaret Blount's Animal Land, but these sources won't turn up on a search using either "A.A. Milne" or the book title as your search term.  If you do not know where this bibliography is, or do not know how to use it, ASK a librarian or see me.

    Once you have found these two critical pieces, analyze and compare their contributions to your understanding of the children's book with which they deal.  Briefly summarize their major points, discuss whether (and why) you find those points convincing, and conclude by a discussion of which of the two critical sources would be most useful to someone preparing to use the book in a K-12 classroom, to someone teaching a class such as this one for adult readers, and/or to a student writing an independent critical analysis of the children's book, and why.

    The MLA Bibliography ought to provide you with sufficient references to complete this assignment.  Bear in mind, however, that the NSU Library may not have the book or journal that you need; you should at least conduct the reference search as soon as possible, and if necessary order the items you need from Interlibrary Loan.

     Another source of information on historical children's books is Linnea Hendrickson's Children's Literature: A Guide to the Criticism, which is available in the reference section of the NSU Library and on-line at http://www.unm.edu/~lhendr/    Be forewarned, however, that Hendrickson's book does not include the large amount of children's literature scholarship that has been produced over the past 10-15 years.