Exploring talented children’s humour through creating pop-up storybooks

ABSTRACT

The role of storybooks in offering an educational resource that promotes young children’s cognitive and creative development has been recognised in the previous literature. The small-scale exploratory study reported here investigated children’s senses of humour through pop-up storybook production. A workshop in Hong Kong, entitled Storybook Production: Your Own Pop-Up Storybook, was conducted with eight participants (girls, aged 7–9 years) as part of a summer programme in the Centre for Advancement in Inclusive and Special Education at the University of Hong Kong. During the workshop, the children were taught two core aspects of creative expression: narrative techniques and the pop-up effects involved in creating a storybook. The children created their storylines, infusing their senses of humour into scenes on storyboards and illustrations in pop-up books. They introduced humour in the form of the jokes and funny behaviours of their characters. Their final products provided evidence of talented young children’s expression and understanding of humour.

KEYWORDS:

• Sense of humour
• pop-up storytelling
• arts-based educational research

Acknowledgment

Thank you for the generous support of Mr. Tony Chan in delivering the pop-up techniques for storybook production in the workshop.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).