‘Words and stuff’: Exploring children’s perspectives of classroom reading in the early school years

This is a study of how we can talk with children about their classroom reading experiences, and be informed by what we learn in this conversational space. This study, based on children’s rights to have their voices heard in matters affecting their lives, explored children’s perspectives of reading in their early grade classrooms. A cohort of 15 children were tracked across their first three years of school. This paper presents a slice of this observational study, reporting findings of a photo-sorting activity that was used with individual children to understand the complexities of children’s perspectives of classroom reading and shifts that occurred in their views during their first three years of school.