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Adopting the approach of intrinsic case study, this inquiry documented how a class of 29 young children, aged 3 to 5, experienced and explored poems in teacher-led poetry reading activities. Across one year, they explored 15 books of poetry and 29 short poems. The research identified four primary stages in these activities. Stage one, Connecting: from life to poetry. Stage two, Overall Experiencing: intertextual connection, reading aloud, preliminary discovery, and being aware of poetic forms. Stage three, Detailed Exploration: entailing deeper understanding, representation, application association, and improvisation. Stage four, Suggesting Future Exploration: from poetry to life. The wonderful and open-ended questions of the two teachers helped the children understand the contents of the poems. The teachers also timely guided the children in recognizing the forms of the poems. The use of nimble body movements to represent metaphors and actions in the poems, along with frequent improvisation, were key features of this class’s poetry exploration. This approach successfully forged a connection between the immediate, sensuous world and the symbolic, represented worlds for children. Additionaly, the study demonstrated that poems served as a mediator between young children’s lives and their learning. In the process of experiencing and exploring poems, these young children were able to “perceive, feel and think” more deeply, more delicately, and from broader perspectives. The aesthetic reading approach, adopted by the teachers, enabled the children to enjoy the pleasures of delving into both the content and forms of poems, and to use novel metaphors to express the ideographic flavors of poetry reading.

This paper presents a two-year study on picture book reading process involving a teacher and a group of children in Kinmen County. The aim was to explore how children create their interpretation of the story (the interpretive contexts applied by these children) when responding to questions posed in the discussion sessions, the teacher’s ways of participation, and other possible contextual influences. In the first year, two kindergarten teachers and 18 children read picture books together three times a week. In the second year, as children moved on to first grade, 12 of them continued to participate in monthly picture book reading sessions offered by the authors. A total of thirty audio-taped reading sessions were transcribed verbatim. The transcripts were devided by topics with every speaking turn coded. After a thorough inductive analysis, the authors constructed seven categories of children’s interpretive contexts and sorted out teacher’s ways of questioning, probing, and responding. The seven contexts in which the interpretation is drawn included life experiences, the story, common knowledge, the illustration, the author’s intention, compound contexts and others. The most frequently applied interpretive context by kindergarteners was life experiences, whereas the most frequently applied interpretive context by first-graders was the story. The interpretive contexts applied by first-graders were more diversified. Based on the long term observation, it is proposed that the reading culture and the teacher’s role contributed significantly to the development of these children’s diversified interpretive contexts. Lastly, the authors provided some practical suggestions on picture book reading activities and the analytic method for future studies.