Out & About With Poh By Ann Braybrooks

As children grow, it is important to find materials that correspond to their growth in multiple areas in order to strengthen and further their development. Perhaps one of the best tools for accomplishing this task is books, which can be used to strengthen a child’s cognition, language, and understanding of the world around them. One such example is A Wonderful Wind from Disney’s “Out & About with Pooh: A Grow and Learn Library.” This book was written by Ann Braybrooks and demonstrates how a book, when written with appropriate developmental steps in mind, can be an excellent tool for helping children ages five to seven learn and develop in the physical, cognitive, social, and emotional domains.
Before one even begins reading the story, the
Children who are in this stage of development struggle with logical thinking because of their use of centration. By focusing on only one aspect of a situation, children fail to notice other important features that could be key to understanding what they see. In the story, Piglet has a fear of wind because it is loud and causes him to have nightmare (Braybrooks, 1996). In this situation, Piglet exercises centration by only focusing on one factor of the wind. As the story unfolds, Piglet’s friends help him to see that wind can do other things besides be loud and scary by showing him fun activities that require wind. By the end of the story, Piglet is able to consider multiple qualities of wind, and understands that it does not have to be scary. This story line helps to encourage children to look at situations from multiple perspectives, and challenges their cognitive limitation in the area of centration. Though preoperational children cannot be expected to overcome this challenge entirely until they have moved into the concrete operational stage, encouraging children to grow in this area will help them to prepare for success as they move on to the next
The book caters its language and sentence complexity to beginning readers in the five to seven year age range. By age five or six, children can be expected to demonstrate phonological competence in the language development (Siegler et al., 2014). This means that they are capable of making all sounds needed to pronounce words in the English language. Understanding this, the author uses words that include a wide variety of phonemes, including more challenging sounds like the “th” in “there” or the “sh” sound in “reassuringly” (Braybrooks, 1996). By this stage of development, children should have mastered these sounds, and should be capable of producing them when they are confronted in the