Criteria for choosing quality children's literature

Literary education presents an important factor in the child's development. It is of key importance in regard to speech and language development and due to this fact, it is important that adults (the emphasis is on preschool teachers who daily present different literary works to children) provide quality literary education which enables the children to grow and to make progress. This means that the children need to be in contact with quality literature and also the presentation of literary works and its explanation need to be qualitative and reasonable. The thesis titled The criteria for choosing quality children's literature in kindergartens consists of theoretical and empirical part. In the theoretical part I explained the meaning of literary works for a child's speech and language development and their influence on the further reading literacy. More specifically I defined the criteria for choosing quality literature and in which ways preschool teachers can choose literary works. I also compared the Slovenian, Finnish, Croatian and English (UK) preschool curriculum to see whether they include any directions for choosing quality literature. Within the empirical part I used a questionnaire to find out if preschool teachers can define the criteria for choosing quality literature and to what extent do they follow them. The questionnaire was sent out to three different Slovenian kindergartens. The research showed that preschool teachers know some of the criteria for choosing quality children’s literature (for example the criteria for choosing good content and illustrations) which means they provide quality books for their children. Some of the preschool teachers said that they can get involved in some courses where they learn which books are considered quality children’s books, but they could also get more knowledge about this topic already during their formal education. Also, the criteria for choosing quality literature should be a part of the preschool curriculum, because at the moment the Slovenian as well as the Finnish, Croatian and English (UK) don’t include any