Teaching sense through nonsense with Winnie the Pooh.

Alright folks, I know you've been dying to know what goodies I've come up with in my Winnie the Pooh paper, so here you go. Below is the first paragraph and if you feel so inclined, click the 'read more here' link at the bottom to read the first 5 pages of my paper.

I'd also love your feedback on this. As I got onto the 6th page, I realized that this needs some heavy editing or it's going to be 10 pages long. So keep that in mind as you read it and feel free to suggest where I should cut and rearrange.

Picture this: a round, yellow bear, with Very Little Brains covers himself in mud, to look like a rain cloud of course, and uses a blue balloon, to match the sky of course, to float up to the top of a hunny tree to steal some hunny from the bees. You may recognize this picture from the story, In which we are introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees and the Stories Begin, from the book, Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne. Children love Winnie the Pooh stories, like the one described above. But most parents and teachers consider stories like Winnie the Pooh only useful for entertainment purposes. Reading for entertainment is a great skill for children to learn early on, because it builds in them the value of learning. Parents and teachers may choose other books for children to enjoy but still teach them something at the same time. For instance, The Story of Snow: The Science of Winter’s Wonder by Mark Cassino. This book is written in the format of a story but is still able to teach children about the world around them, specifically the science of snow. What many parents and teachers don’t realize is that Winnie-the-Pooh has the ability to teach children about the world around them in the same, if not better, way that The Story of Snow does. Winnie-the-Pooh falls under the genre of fiction, but more important to note is it’s sub-genre of nonsense literature. It, and other books of it’s kind have merit for more than their entertainment value. Although many consider nonsense literature to be purely for entertainment purposes, much nonsense literature like A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories are actually valuable to learners because they not only help children grasp the concept of language, but they teach them how to sift out the sense from the nonsense.

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