CLASSIFICATION OF CHILDREN’S
LITERATURE
1. Traditional Literature
• Refers to those that have been handed down
from generation to generation by word of mouth
before the invention of printing
• They are a product of a race (e.g., the Teutonic
or the Malay) and their features usually identify
the people who put them together.
• The body of traditional literature is sometimes
referred to as folk literature.
• The most common types are:
 Fairy tales
 Folktales
 Parables
 Fables
 Myths
 Riddles
 Catches
 Jingles, and
 Folk songs
• Pourquoi stories tell why the sky is high or why
the sea is salt or why the pineapple has a
hundred eyes.
▫ “Pourquoi” is a french term meaning why.
▫ legends talk of the first banana, the first bamboo, or the
first lanzon fruit.
▫ they explain the beginning of certain objects
2. Poetry
• is not exactly the type of literature that most
people get readily excited about. That is sad
because, as children our first acquaintance with
children’s literature was generally made through
the little rhyming songs and jingles that we loved
to repeat as we went about motions songs and
choral recitations. Who has not sung “Little
Sally Water,” “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” or “PenPen, Leron-Leron Sinta”? Those were our first
poems!
• Then you were taught “The Owl” and “All Things Bright and
Beautiful.” Some of us were lucky to get introduced to the socalled Mother Goose Rhymes. They are nursery rhymes put
together by Charles Perrault, a Frenchman who also wrote
down the most popular Cinderella variant.
When his
collection was published, the book featured on its cover a
picture of a big goose wearing “motherly” clothes and
surrounded by listening young animals and children. Mother
Goose introduced us to Mary and her lost lamb, Little Jack
Horner, and “Twinkle, twinkle little star.”
• The way you took to reciting and memorizing nursery rhymes
in your childhood is similar to the way a two-year-old today
would readily sing or recite the latest jingle.
• Children also respond to simple lyrics that describe a familiar
flower, the experience of hearing the rain on the roof, the
aroma wafting from the kitchen when Nanay cooks ginataan,
and the feeling one gets when Tatay comes home and being
lost in his embrace.
• There are nonsense poems that make children
giggle, like the rhyme “Monumento/Konting bato,/
konting semento/Monumento.” When they are a
little older, children are fascinated by the measured
limericks, funny and witty verses that follow the
aabba scheme, and its distinctive rhythm. For
example:
There once was a lady from Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They came back from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger
-
a
a
b
b
a
• There’s another that has a bit of sophistication in it:
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose steed was far faster than light.
She went out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
• Edward Lear is the most well-known of the writers
of limericks. In the centennial of his birth a few
years ago, England released several stamps
featuring his famous lines and drawings.
• Other poems are narrative in mode rather than
descriptive. They are easier to read, the narrative
being an easier discourse for any type of reader to
deal with. Your own or your parents’ recollection of
narrative
poems
would
probably
include
“Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie” and “Hiawatha,” both
by Henry W. Longfellow, and Florante at Laura by
Francisco Balagtas. For younger children, there’s
“Winken, Blinken and Nod” and “ The Duel” by
Eugene Field. Also, most of you probably still sing
“Apat na Pulubi” to your children or the children of
your other relatives.
• Didactive poems are the openly “preachy” ones
that we rarely see nowadays. Didactic mean
“teaching”. An example of this kind of poem is
“A Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow. It begins with:
Tell me not in mournful numbers
Life is but an empty dream
For the soul is dead that slumbers
And things are not what they seem.
3. Informational Books
• Are those that allow young readers to accumulate as
much factual knowledge as they might be interested
in.
• The selections include the very basic informational
books such as alphabet book, numeracy books, and
concept books, including those that introduce
children to shapes and colors, and how-to-do-it
books that teach them how to make paper boats or
how to assemble a toy or how to bake angel cake.
• The most common are the content area books, i.e.,
books that are read for the different subject areas:
history, mathematics, science, social studies, health,
etc.
• Informational books on science concepts for
early graders may be presented in the form of
stories, as in Jose Aruego and Arianne Dewey’s
We Hide, You Seek (camouflage), Adarna’s
Munting
Patak-Ulan
(the
concepts
of
evaporation and condensation), and Si Duglit,
ang Dugong Makulit (circulation of the blood) by
pediatrician-writer Luis P. Garmaitan.
• Informational books would also include first
dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases.
4. Biography/Autobiography
• There are times when the biography and its
related types are classified with informational
books. The latter focuses on things, places, and
concepts while the former targets personalities.
• A story of one’s life written by oneself, as you
know, is called an autobiography.
• No Filipino writer of note has written An
autobiography yet except Bienvenido Santos
who gathered the letters he had sent his friends
in his lifetime. From these, his life emerges, to
be put together by the reader.
• A biography may be a straight biography, a
fictionalized biography, or biographical fiction.
• A straight biography takes pains to share only
documented facts about a particular individual.
In style, it resembles history textbooks.
• May Hill Arbuthnot, the expert on children and
books, differentiates the two other sub-types of
biography (Zena Sutherland, 1991)
 Fictionalized biographies are also based on research,
but known facts are often presented in dramatic
episodes complete with conversation.
 Biographical function, there are more authorial
liberties taken, especially in the inclusion of (several)
imaginary characters.
• An example of straight biography would be the
Tahanan series on Filipino heroes, including
Jose Rizal and his mother, Teodora Alonzo,
Andres Bonifacio, Apolinario Mabini, Emilio
Aguinaldo, and Gabriela Silang.
5. Fiction
• Fiction for children ranges from growing up stories
to historical fiction; from mysteries to science
fiction; from adventure stories to romance and
fantasy; and that special classification that falls
under the heading, animal stories.
• Growing-up stories, as the name suggests, have
themes that are close to the heart of the growing
reader (based on the research which Diaz de Rivera
conducted last 1988). The study yielded three most
identified themes. The search for identity is first.
Examples stories with this theme are Polly
Cameron’s The Cat Who Thought He Was a Tiger,
Elizabeth Guilfoile’s Nobody Listens to Andrew, and
The Story about Ferdinand by Munro Leaf.
• The warmth of family and home is another favorite
theme, as evidenced by their choice of Breakfast with
Father by Ron Roy, Make Way for Ducklings by
Robert McCloskey, Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag,
and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig.
• Friendship and the community spirit is a strong third
in the roster of favorite themes. This is evident in the
titles cited, such as Mirra Ginsburg’s Mushroom in
the Rain, a retelling of Stone Soup by Marcia Brown,
and The Biggest Bear by Lynd Ward.
• It was found that they also like the theme of going
away and coming back to a welcoming home. The
journey motif enables young readers to take
vicarious trips to new places, and meet new friends
in the process. But they wish the young hero/es to
always come home in the end. Typical of these
stories are Little Ducklings Went Wandering and
Where the Wild Things Are by the great Maurice
Sendak.
• Note that in these stories, other types of fiction may
be identified, like adventure stories, mysteries and
fantasy, and animal stories, although they deserve a
section of their own.
• Historical fiction is a field that is richly tapped in
other shores but only timidly tried by local writers.
The only Filipino titles that come to mind are
Makisig, Boy Hero of Mactan by Gemma Cruz and
Kangkong 1869 by Ceres Albarado.
• A historical fictionist picks out a character, whether
imaginative or actual, and situates the life of this
character against the background of a historical
event. In Cruz’s story, it was the Lapulapu-Magellan
encounter. The Alabado novel is set in Kangkong,
one of several places where the Cry of Balintawak is
said to have taken place.
• Animal stories are a subtype of fiction but they
deserve a special discussion.
• There are three types of animal stories:
▫ stories that present animals as they are
▫ stories that depict talking animals and
▫ those that show animals as people