Examples Of Developmental Bibliotherapy

Developmental bibliotherapy can be used to help children deal with a variety of problems such as bullying, fears, death, and acceptance problems. The ten-step implementation process can be adapted to help a child deal with each of these problems. Additionally, there are also more detailed and specific ways to help a child use developmental bibliotherapy to cope with each of these individual problems.
Bullying is a huge problem within the education system today and it can prevent students from succeeding academically because of the emotional turmoil that consumes them. When using bibliotherapy as an avenue to help children overcome problems with bullying, besides just using the ten-implementation process it is important to consider what coping
Although these fears may be classified as “adult” fears, children are exposed to them due to the large amount of coverage of these events in our media today. It is the educator’s responsibility to recognize their students’ fears and use the implementation process to create developmental bibliotherapy lesson plans to incorporate into the literacy lessons. As the educator, some ways to make ensure that your lesson plans on how to cope with fears through using literature are effective are by making sure there is some sort of activity in your lesson. Examples of effective activities that work along side the literature are dramatization, pantomiming, puppetry, role-playing, written responses, constructing collages, reading aloud, and composing a letter (Nicholson & Pearson, 2003). In addition to creative activities, identification with the characters in the literature is part of the implementation process that needs to be highly attended to when using developmental bibliotherapy to help children cope with fears. Nicholson and Pearson describes the importance of these two parts of the implementation process pertaining to helping children cope with fears when she states: “Good stories allow children to see themselves in the main characters and to be moved emotionally by the struggles and triumphs of the characters. When combined with creative activities designed to elicit personal connections between the listener and those characters, children's literature becomes a powerful tool for helping youngsters develop strategies for coping with their own struggles” (Nicholson & Pearson, 2003, 15). When using developmental bibliotherapy with fears it is crucial that there is more emphasis put on the identification with the main character step and the follow up creative activity step in order for it to work