OK, judging by the poll, you’re either ready to read far more for this course; or you really enjoy reading for it 
Well, not really; obviously I can’t draw any such conclusion from it. But if you are open to some wider reading / inspiration, try Write 4 Children. Here are some snippets from its second issue.
Michael Rosen, An Apology for Poetry:
Much of children’s lives are circumscribed by explicit and implicit rules. These come ultimately from all the adults around them. No matter how hard we as adults try, we find it very difficult to grant children autonomy over parts of their own lives – even when there is no justification in an argument for health and safety, or psychological danger or whatever. I look at our new kitchen and realise that at present we’ve put a lot of things out of reach of the children. Is there any reason why children’s shouldn’t be able to get a bowl or a cup by themselves? Why have we built in dependence even into our kitchen?
Laura Atkins, White Privilege and Children’s Publishing:
I have been disturbed by the recent controversy over the cover of a book called Liar, written by white Australian author Justine Larbalestier. In this case, American publisher Bloomsbury put a white girl’s face on the cover of her book, even though the author has stated in her blog post about the cover that she meant the girl to be black…..Recently there has been another controversy as Bloomsbury once again published a book featuring a young woman with ‘dark skin’ using a photograph of a very white-looking girl on the cover (Magic Under the Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore). And again, after an outcry developed on the blogosphere, they have decided to change the cover. The same has happened with another book, The Mysterious Benedict Society series by Trenton Lee Stuart and published by Little Brown. In this case a mixed-race boy was illustrated as white on the front cover, and Little Brown have said they will change the covers. A new Facebook group, ‘Readers Against Whitewashing’ was founded in January 2010, bringing together blog postings, articles and news on the subject. So that’s three times in the last year that publishers have changed covers based on blogger response. What seems to be missing is a clear and transparent response from people who work in publishing.
Bridget Carrington, Many Leagues Behind: researching the history of YA fiction for girls:
Throughout the century and a half I examined [1750-1890], those novels which, through the heightened reality of their plots, and the engagement of their female protagonists, realistically explored the complexities of life-choices for their young audience were the YA fiction of their time. These works were the ‘crossover’ novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as assuredly as Salinger, Cormier, Pullman and Burgess are of the twentieth and twenty-first.
Virginia Lowe, I Love Monsters – Pretend Monsters in Books:
Young children are constantly underestimated. Cognitive psychologists work towards an average so that one can make some clinical study of each child. This naturally differs from analysis and discussion of adults and adult material. No one would dream of saying ‘thirty-six year olds will find this aspect difficult’ or ‘no one under fifty understands that other people have minds’ – ultimately, some will and some won’t, it’s acknowledged as a personality thing. Whereas with children, it tends to be taken as axiomatic…. And the findings of the psychologists, average as they are, grossly underestimating children at the peak of their ability, have often not made their way to the children’s literature critics, who then, and even sometimes now, seem ignorant of the fact that neonates can recognise photos of their mothers, for instance – that they can clearly interpret pictures (Barrera and Maurer).
