Fairies Inspire the Literary Minds of Young Children at CSDC
 

Local children’s author Tracy Kane leads children and their families in building fairy houses at the UNH Child Study and Development Center.

Local author Tracy Kane provoked the literary imaginations of children and families at the UNH Child Study and Development Center recently with her stories of the fairy world.

The author of Fairy Houses, Fairy Boat, and Fairy Flight, Kane shared her writings and illustrations with infants through to kindergarten children before leading families in a series of workshops to design fairy houses. The houses, lovingly created from natural materials collected from around the center, are waiting to be installed in the surrounding woods once the snow and mud recede into spring.

The many questions from the kindergarten children as Kane read her books revealed a sincere desire to understand the work of an author and illustrator: “Is that a drawing of you when you were a child?” “How come you read the words you wrote?”

The goal of the teachers was to have the children view themselves as authors with ideas and experiences worth writing down. As the focus for a week of literacy activities at CSDC, the author visit also deepened the children’s ideas about the process of writing and illustrating by seeing the many sources of literary inspiration.