"The night that Max wore his wolf-suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his Mother called him "WILD THING!" and Max said "I'LL EAT YOU UP!" so he was sent to bed without eating anything."

Maurice Sendak, 1963

From the opening lines of the classic children's book Where the Wild Things Are the author, Maurice Sendak, invites us to travel along with Max to understand his vision of the world and the limitations associated with childhood. Through the use of carefully chosen text and surrealistic illustrations, Sendak invites us to accompany Max on a journey into his imagination. By creating an imaginary world where wild things, " roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth", Max pushes through the limitations imposed upon him by his mother and the realities of childhood as he sails through night and day and in an out of weeks to an imaginary land where he is feared and crowned king of all the wild things.

As the story progresses, Max's imagination grows and readers notice that the text slowly disappears and the illustrations expand to three border-less, double page spreads. These text-free pages correspond to the "rumpus" where the story reaches its climax and Max's imagination has completely replaced reality. The written text becomes associated with reality and the illustrations become associated with Max's imagination. However, Sendak does not draw a definitive line for us between reality and imagination, instead he allows imagination to slowly overtake reality as the forest consumes Max's bedroom, and then allows reality to reassert itself as the text reappears in the final pages. As the book closes, Max returns home and finds a hot supper waiting for him.

The title of this article, "Overcoming Limitations", refers to one of the central tensions in Sendak's book, as well as the current political climate we face as literacy educators. Max tries to push through the limitations imposed upon him by his mother and the reality of his childhood in much the same way, as literacy educators, we are trying to push through the limitations imposed upon us by narrowly construed reading programs and standardized assessments. In our pedagogical fervor to insure that every child is a reader by the third grade and, "No Child is Left Behind", reading instruction has focused on the oral performance of texts, a steady progression through a series of leveled books and the identification of a single "main idea" on standardized assessments.

Change in reading instructional practices are supported by a change in a teacher's theoretical perspective (Lehman, Freeman & Allen, 1994). It is not sufficient for classroom teachers to simply fill their rooms with quality children's literature or read aloud on a daily basis. A change in resources, from a basal program to authentic children's literature, needs to be accompanied by a change in theoretical perspective if the full potential of transactional and reader response theories are to be realized. As teachers put aside modernist perspectives concerning knowledge, texts and the role of the reader, they are better positioned to adopt a reader response theoretical orientation that supports the construction of multiple interpretations and meanings in transaction with a piece of literature in an interpretive community (Fish, 1980).

To illustrate what reading instructional practices based on a reader response theoretical perspective may look like, I will share some experiences that occurred during a teacher research project conducted in my intermediate multiage classroom during the 2000-2001 school year. During this project, I wanted to understand how organizing carefully selected picture books that focus on a central theme, revisiting a "cornerstone" picture book for an extended period of time, creating visual representations of classroom discussions and ÒdisruptingÓ quality picture books to provide alternative perspectives for the reader, can expand students' interpretations and understandings. The Òpre-planned classroom learning experiencesÓ I will describe in this article align with the foundations of reader response theories. These experiences focus on the construction of meaning during the transaction between a particular community of readers, a particular text and context.

For this project, I selected Where the Wild Things Are as a "cornerstone" text, a text my students and I would explore in depth before moving on to other picture books. This text was then used as a foundation for our discussions during a unit of study focusing on the theme "Escaping Reality". I wanted my students to become intimately involved in the discussions focusing on the books I would read aloud each day, constructing their individual interpretations while respecting the interpretations offered by their classmates. By utilizing a variety of learning experiences based on reader response theories, including; (a) the use of high quality picture books that contain a sense of irony or ambiguity, (b) visual representations of our "invested discussions", "disrupting" texts to provide students with alternative perspectives from which to respond to our stories and supporting dialogue among our community of readers, I hoped to engage students in the process of interpreting texts and discussing their interpretations in our classroom community.

I will begin this article with a brief description of the limitations associated with traditional reading instruction based on modernist perspectives and the "New Criticism", followed by a discussion of reader response theories and how these relate to elementary reading instruction. The primary focus of the article will be the teacher research project I conducted and how it demonstrates the practical application of reader response theories in an intermediate elementary classroom.

Limitations of Traditional Reading Instruction

Attempts to uncover the one "true meaning" or main idea of a text have a narrowing effect on the reading instructional practices and the literature discussions that take place in contemporary elementary classrooms (Beach, 1993). Based on modernist assumptions about the nature of reality and the dualistic relationship between the reader and the text, the New Criticism of the 1940's and 50's still dictates to a large extent reading and literature instruction in today's schools (Dias, 1992). Although the New Critics do not deny that readers are involved in the act of reading, they hold firm to the belief that there is one true meaning of a text, and that only through precise, technical, objective analysis of a text can readers come to know its true meaning (Probst, 1992). Based on modernist perspectives, students are seen as flawed, imperfect readers, flailing around trying to find the secret codes to unlock the true meaning of a piece of literature, while the teacher becomes the authority, controlling which interpretations are valued and which ones can be discarded.

Because of the effects of these modernist perspectives on reading instruction, students are often found waiting for the teacher or the "Cliff Notes" to tell them what a piece of literature is really all about. As exposure to this type of reading instruction in school expands, the teacher is eventually perceived as the unquestioned arbiter of meaning, the keeper of the literary knowledge. Many students eventually end up "opting out" of literature discussions, deciding, instead, to wait for the teacher to hand them the correct answers.

In our educational institutions, students become socialized into particular ways of reading and responding to texts. As members of a classroom, children learn which ways of responding to texts are appropriate and valued by that particular community of readers. In other words, they learn how to play the "Reading Game" at school, where students assume particular roles and adopt social practices sanctioned by particular discourses (Gee, 1996). Because of this, it is no longer simply a matter of deciding how to teach reading, it is also important to decide what kinds of readers we want to create in our schools, what ways of responding to texts will be valued and what perspectives students are encouraged to adopt (Luke, 1995).

Instructional practices or commercial reading programs that require children to read a piece of literature and then answer a series of multiple choice questions to assess their comprehension reduce the readers' possible responses to a story to those interpretations made available in the assessments or sanctioned by the instructional manual. In many of these instructional programs, there is a predetermined main idea for each story and it can be found hidden among the four choices provided by the commercial publisher. Students are simply asked to recall literal details from the text and ignore any meanings that are constructed as they transact with the text or personal responses that may be evoked during their reading. Readers often become responsible for finding answers to questions that are predetermined and sanctioned by the authors of the commercial program. Whether children can answer these questions correctly, or what being able to answer these questions correctly actually means, may not be as important as the way these assessments position readers in our classrooms.

Teachers often treat literature as a tool for teaching content areas or delivering reading instructional lessons rather than as a work of art to be shared and discussed. Paper and pencil comprehension questions used to assess what a reader takes away from their reading, and a barrage of activities used to "enrich" a reader's experience with a literary text, have come to dominate the reading experiences of children in many elementary classrooms.

Reading instructional programs that focus on the leveling of texts, (e.g. Accelerated Reader), have reduced reading comprehension to correctly answering a series of literal recall questions on a computer program (Paul & Paul, 1990). These programs have forced readers to worry more about how many "reading trophies" they have acquired than their ability to discuss and enjoy a piece of literature. Readers are required to find the main idea in each selection and be able to recall specific details that are deemed important by the creators of the program's assessments in order to be a successful reader. These programs are based on modernist perspectives, assuming that meaning can be found in the text and it is the reader's duty to extract the correct information. In these narrowly construed programs, children's literature is reduced to an instructional tool or "leveled task".

This focus on the text as a receptacle of meaning, the reader as a passive recipient of information, the teacher as arbiter of knowledge and literature as a leveled task to be completed, forces reader response theories to the periphery of reading instructional practices. As literacy educators, if we allow reading instruction to be reduced to one's ability to answer literal recall questions, identify a predetermined main idea and produce a fluent oral performance of a text, the ability to discuss literature, share one's personal responses and understand the historical, social and cultural significance of a text will be set aside in favor of programs that align with modernist perspectives and focus on raising standardized test scores.

Reader Response Perspectives

In reaction to these modernist perspectives, reader response and transactional theories of reading have tried to bring the role of the reader and the context of the reading event back into the interpretive process (Beach, 1993). A transactional or reader response perspective is based on the belief that meaning is constructed in the transaction between a particular reader and a particular text (Rosenblatt, 1978). Readers are encouraged to bring their background knowledge and personal experiences to bear on the reading event and share these with other readers in critical dialogue. Reading is seen as the construction of meaning in the internal, cognitive space of the individual reader, in transaction with a particular text.

Rosenblatt's (1978) work in reader response theory is concerned with the "lived through" or aesthetic experiences of readers, as well as the information readers "carry away" or from the reading event. Reader response theories perceive readers as active participants in the reading process, constructing meaning as they transact with a piece of literature in a particular context. Although various reader response theorists focus their writings on either the reading context, the text or the reader, all three of these components are involved in the construction of meaning that occurs during the reading process (Tompkins, 1980).

Rather than reducing reading to the search for a single main idea, most contemporary reader response theories are concerned with the social construction of a "plurality of meanings" that are shaped by the social, cultural, political and historical context of the readers, the text and the reading event. Because of this social construction of meanings, the concept of main idea may now be defined as one socially sanctioned interpretation of a piece of literature, rather than the discovery of some universal truth, hidden deep within the bowels of the text, accessible only to a certain class of readers. In a sense, main ideas are socially constructed phenomena, endorsed interpretations by a particular authority, that are sanctioned by groups in authority. However, as the texts we require children to read grow more complex and the cultural experiences and histories of readers grows more diverse, the concept of a single universal main idea becomes problematic.

In the reading instructional practices based on reader response theories, the value of exploring the conflicting perspectives associated with the construction of multiple interpretations takes precedence over the search for a universal main idea. In other words, rather than seeing a plurality of meanings as a problem to be overcome, the construction of a plurality of meanings becomes an opportunity to extend classroom discussions and help children develop more sophisticated interpretations of the texts they experience. From a reader response perspective, children's literature can be used to create a “space”, an opportunity for classroom teachers to support readers' multiple interpretations and the social construction of meaning.

Overcoming Modernist Limitations

In response to the instructional practices that align with a modernist perspective, the experiences provided in classrooms aligning to reader response theory view the reading and sharing of children's literature as a space for interpretations to be voiced and discussed, possible meanings to be critiqued and members of an interpretive community to become active participants in the meaning making process (Serafini, 2001). These instructional practices are designed to enlarge a student's repertoire of response to a particular text (Hancock, 1993). Helping students assume new perspectives to literature, developing each reader's ability to respond to their readings and creating a community of readers that are willing to share their interpretations with each other in a supportive environment are some of the goals of a reader response oriented classroom.

By providing students with opportunities to discuss quality pieces of literature, creating a comfortable, respectful classroom environment and nurturing the development of a community of readers during the course of the school year, I hoped create a space where students felt supported to share their personal responses to literature, enter into dialogue with each other, accept the plurality of meanings constructed during reading, assume a new stance to their own readings and remain open to the multiple possibilities offered by these various texts and illustrations. I wanted students to be able to live with the uncertainties involved in reading a complex picture book and to feel comfortable returning to a book again and again to construct new and more sophisticated interpretations.

In order to achieve these goals, there are several considerations or preplanned experiences that I have used in my classroom that support the above mentioned goals. These include; (a) the careful selection of high quality picture books, (b) an extended focus on cornerstone texts, (c) "disrupting" a text, (d) creating visual representations of literature discussions, and (e) developing an interpretive community of readers. Each of these considerations and experiences align with a reader response perspective. They are designed to involve the student reader as an active participant in the reading process, acknowledge the construction of meaning in the transaction of reader, text and context as the primary goal of the reading process and view the construction of diverse interpretations and meanings as an important aspect of a community of readers.

The Use of High Quality Picture Books

The use of quality picture books in elementary and intermediate classrooms has exploded in recent years (Bishop & Hickman, 1992). As readers read picture books, they are invited to transact with visual images, as well as written text in order to construct meaning during their reading. It is the interplay between text and illustrations that make picture books unique and require readers to attend to different semiotic systems to construct meaning (Sipe, 1998).

The books I selected for use in this classroom project have multiple layers of meanings and invite the reader to return again and again to the text to construct new and varied interpretations. The illustrations in these books support the construction of meaning and offer readers a different perspective from which to consider the story. It is the combination of carefully chosen text and well crafted illustrations that supports children's interpretations and the various meanings they will construct. The types of picture books I choose to read with my students and the community of readers that developed in my classroom had a profound effect on students' view of the reading process and the way they are positioned as readers.

Sipe (1998) has written, “Picture books… give children the opportunity to engage in an unending process of meaning making as every rereading brings about new ways of looking at words and pictures. In other words, picture books allow children to have multiple experiences as they engage in creating new meanings and constructing new worlds.” (p. 107). He further explains that the relationship between text and illustrations in a children's picture book is a synergistic one, where the effects and meanings offered by the two in unison are greater than the sum of the text and the illustrations individually (Sipe, 1998). It is this synergistic relationship between text and pictures that is a primary consideration in my choices of picture books to use in my classroom.

Nodelman (1988) describes how the text and the illustrations in a picture book expand as well as limit each other and describes this relationship as one of ambiguity or “irony”. Text contains temporal information that is presented to readers in a sequential, linear fashion as they progress from the start to the ending of a book. Illustrations, however, contain spatial information and are presented “all-at-once”, allowing us to move our eyes around the page as we please. Because of the interplay of the text and illustrations, the possibilities for constructing meanings in transaction with a picture book are endless.

Because of these considerations, I choose books to share with my students that contain this sense of ambiguity between text and illustrations and do not present an immediate resolution to the tensions developed in the story. In the picture book Where the Wild Things Are, there exists a sense of tension and ambiguity between what is offered in the written text and what is offered in the illustrations. Children perceive this tension and have to participate in the production of meaning, using both the text as well as the illustrations to make sense of the story.

For example, in the written text, Sendak describes Max's travels as going through night and day, in and out of weeks and almost over a year. This statement is in conflict with Max's return and the hot supper waiting for him. Children in my class have used their imaginations to try and resolve this tension. During this study, one child even suggested that Max's mother probably used a microwave oven to reheat the food so that it was warm when Max returned from his travels.

In another example, the illustrations portray a sense of elapsed time as Sendak alternates light and dark colors in the sky suggesting the progression from day to night, and back to day. This visual illustration of the passage of time and the tension between the illustrations and text is further developed by the changing phases of the moon. In one picture it appears as a quarter moon and in others as a full moon. My students have suggested that time must have passed if the moon's shape had changed. However, this made them unsure about how Max's supper could still be warm. These literary experiences help students learn that not all of their questions would be resolved by reference to the literal details presented in the text and that a variety of interpretations are not only possible, but expected.

When transacting with picture books, readers must use both visual cues and textual references to construct meaning. We read picture books in a recursive fashion, alternating between the simultaneous character of the illustrations and the sequential nature of the textual features. It is my contention that picture books like Where the Wild Things Are, that contain ambiguity, tension or irony between text and illustrations, offer more opportunities for students and teachers to interact and construct diverse interpretations. The possible meanings offered by texts of this type extend readers repertoires for responding to texts and allow them to expand their interpretive processes.

Cornerstone Texts

Not only am I concerned with the quality of the picture books that I choose to share in my classroom, I am also concerned with the ways these books are presented and the amount of time allocated for discussions. In addition to Where the Wild Things Are, I selected a series of approximately thirteen different picture books for this unit of study that share a connection to the theme "Escaping Reality". I began with an extensive study of Where the Wild Things Are before moving on to the other books. I wanted my students to use our discussions of Where the Wild Things Are as a foundation for understanding the other books in the study, and to make connections among the stories. In this way, Where the Wild Things Are became a "cornerstone" text, one that was used to provide the foundation for the discussion of other texts (Serafini, 2001).

As a classroom teacher, I have so many wonderful picture books that I believe are important to share each year, I often feel pressured to read one each day and simply move on to a new book the following day. In my hurry to expose children to a wide variety of children's literature throughout the course of a school year, I may inadvertently demonstrate a "read it once and move on" mentality about interacting with a piece of literature. I believe that this is a mistake. In our rush as educators to "cover the reading curriculum" we often forget to "uncover" the literature that is a part of it. By spending an extensive amount of time reading and discussing Where the Wild Things Are I wanted to demonstrate to my students the value of revisiting a text to construct a variety of interpretations. During an extensive exploration of a particular piece of literature, referred to here as a cornerstone text, students often come to new insights and interpretations and are able to extend their understandings of one text to make connections to other texts.

I began by reading Where the Wild Things Are aloud every day for a week and discussing it as a whole group. I also allowed students to revisit this book during our reading workshop by providing multiple copies of the book for them to explore on their own. After a second week of intensive discussion and attention to Where the Wild Things Are, I began to read the other picture books that I included in our theme of Escaping Reality (see figure 1). Time was provided for students to discuss each new book and its connections to the other books in our study. Because of the extensive amount of time and attention we dedicated to Where the Wild Things Are, children frequently made references back to this particular book. Each new book we read built upon the previous discussions, new connections were made and students began to notice similarities and differences among the various texts and illustrations.

Disrupting a Text

After we had read and talked about Where the Wild Things Are for over a week, we took the book apart, literally! At the beginning of the second week, we looked at a version of the written text without the illustrations to see what this perspective may offer. I typed up the words of the book on a single sheet of paper, made an overhead of the text for our class discussions and provided copies for each student to write their comments on as they read through it. By looking at the text in this manner, students noticed its poetic structure, the words that were in capitals and bold letters and how short the written text actually was. They also noticed that the word “and” and other phrases were used repeatedly throughout the text. They commented on the words Sendak used to describe Max's journey, and noticed that some of his sentences were really quite long.

By "disrupting" the text, allowing my students to see only the written text without the illustrations, students interpretations focused on different aspects of the written text compared to when I had simply read it aloud. The next day, I disrupted the text in a different manner. This time I laid out the pages of the book in storyboard fashion across one of the walls of my room. I took apart two paperback copies of the book so that we could see all of the illustrations simultaneously, as well as the structure of the book and illustrations as a whole.

By taking the book apart and displaying the illustrations so that they could be seen all at once, we noticed the expansion of Max's imagination, represented by the increasing size of the illustrations, as Max continued towards the climax of the story. This storyboard version of the text allowed us to see various patterns in the illustrations and how the illustrations became larger and then smaller as the story continued. Because of the storyboard layout, they were able to talk about the illustrations as a whole, rather than simply one picture at a time. By viewing the text and the illustrations in three different formats, (a) text only, (b) storyboard and (c) as a complete picture book, we were able to extend our interpretations of the text and offer varying perspectives from which to analyze the story.

Creating Visual Representations of Literature Discussions

While reading each book in the unit of study, including Where the Wild Things Are, I created a series of three large wall charts; one for our Impressions, one for our Personal and Literary Connections and one for our Wonderings, or lingering questions. By adding to these charts after reading each book in the unit, these Impressions, Connections, Wonderings (ICW) charts created a visual representation of the discussions that took place in our classroom. In a sense, the chart served as a visual representation of our intellectual journey, allowing us to preserve the interpretations in written form my students were making across the various titles in our unit on Escaping Reality. These visual representations allowed students to see the connections they were making as our discussions progressed. I used a different color marker for each book so that students could remember which comment went with each book. These charts helped us to ask questions, offer our interpretations and discuss different perspectives as we progressed through the unit of study.

After a few of the books in the unit had been read, I created made what may be called a "traditional comparison chart” on an adjacent wall in our classroom. This comparison chart included the titles of the various books we read and discussed down the left hand column, and several selected elements of literature along the top of the chart, including; setting, characters, point of view, tensions and author's purpose. As we read each book, I asked my students to identify the elements that were involved in each story. As we progressed through our discussions and filled out this chart, I grew concerned about the content and quality of our discussions. The complexity of my students' interpretations and the wonderful connections they were making previously across the texts in this study seemed to disappear.

I began to think that it was the structure of the comparison chart, focusing entirely on the elements of literature as separate categories, that somehow limited these discussions. I decided to try a second comparison chart that contained different categories. Rather than imposing the elements of literature as predetermined headings or categories, I decided to use the concepts that were emerging from our discussions as categories in the new comparison chart. I referred to the notes I had recorded in my research journal over the course of our project and identified eight "emergent" categories that had become prominent aspects of our discussions. These categories were then used to create a second comparison chart to help students re-visualize our connections across texts (see figure 2). These headings included; (a) Escaping Reality, (b) Growing, (c) Windows, (d) Changes in Character, (e) Animals as Catalysts, (f) The Role of the Bedroom and (g) Parent-Child Relationships. Student comments and the quality of our discussions returned to the level of complexity and sophistication that I had experienced earlier with the ICW charts.

Clearly, the imposition of the predetermined categories, in this case the elements of literature, narrowed the focus of our discussions in much the same way that the search for a singular main idea often reduces students' interpretations of a piece of literature. By following my students' lead and using the connections that were being made in our literature discussions, the categories for the second "emergent headings" comparison chart supported our discussions rather than limited them.

During the course of the study, I realized how important it is for students to understand the particular structures and elements of literature to be able to make sense of a text. However, being able to simply identify these elements is not sufficient. Successful readers need to understand how these elements of literature are interrelated and how an author weaves these various strands together to construct a narrative. In my rush to see if children could identify the plot, setting and characters of a story, I took all of the complexity out of their discussions and reduced their readings to what I would describe as an "element of literature scavenger hunt." How we learn about the elements of literature and our understandings of their relationship to the construction of story is more important than our ability to simply identify them.

Developing an Interpretive Community of Readers

Along with the quality of the pictures books selected and the learning experiences provided during this project, the characteristics of the community of readers developed in our classroom plays an important role in the way readers transact with texts. Although the concept of a "community" of readers is generally more abstract than the considerations and instructional practices mentioned above, it is nonetheless one of the primary considerations in developing an instructional framework that aligns with a reader response perspective. In reading communities where readers are seen as active participants in the construction of meaning, the search is not for the main idea of a piece of literature, but for the multiple interpretations that are offered by members of the community.

How we respond to our student's interpretations and discussions around a piece of literature, and the interactions we support and value in our classrooms, exerts a tremendous impact on the ways that students come to know the reading process and the social practices associated with children's literature endorsed in our classrooms. We are still teaching children how to play the reading game, only in this instance the rules have changed to allow more freedom of expression and more student investment in the interpretive process.

In an interpretive community, readers feel confident in offering their interpretations and are open to dialogue concerning their beliefs. Readers are willing to suspend premature judgments in order to analyze and consider alternative interpretations. There is a respect for each reader's contributions and a willingness to change one's own ideas in light of new evidence and interpretations. The teacher, as a member of the community of readers, must also remain open to new ideas and interpretations, inviting students to question the teacher's ideas as well. It is a challenging, yet supportive community where students offer interpretations, share feelings about stories, critique each other's interpretations and come to deeper understandings about the texts they read.

Conclusion

The use of children's literature as the basis of reading instruction does not guarantee an alignment with a reader response theoretical perspective. Modernist perspectives have dominated reading instruction over the past decades, and a shift in resources must be accompanied by a shift in theoretical orientations if teachers are to overcome the limitations imposed by traditional reading practices. A modernist orientation, with its accompanying instructional practices, limits the role of the reader and places the authority of the text and the teacher above the meanings constructed by the reader..

Reading instructional practices that align with reader response theory must consider the knowledge and experiences of the reader and the context of the reading event in addition to the structures and language of the text itself. Meaning is constructed during the act of reading as readers draw upon their knowledge of the world, their literary understandings and the text. This basic premise must be taken into consideration as we develop the learning experiences and assessments that are to be used in elementary reading instruction.

During this study, it was my intention to expand the opportunities for interpreting a piece of literature and create a space where students can share diverse interpretations in order to deepen their own understandings of a particular text. Because our community of readers accepted and supported a variety of interpretations, students learned how to deal with the uncertainty and ambiguity that often comes with the construction of multiple interpretations of a quality picture book. I have learned that I need to help children live with the ambiguities inherent in quality literature and help them move beyond the limitations imposed on them by traditional school curriculum and instructional practices. By providing a variety of learning experiences based on reader response theories, I hope to expand student's understandings of what it means to be a reader, their role as a reader in educational institutions and classroom teacher's perspectives concerning the reading process.

Figure 1:

Humphrey's Bear - Jan Wahl

George Shrinks - William Joyce

The Paradise Garden - Colin Thompson

Salamander Room - Anne Mazer

Just a Dream - Chris Van Allsburg

Moon Tiger - Phyllis Root

The Field Beyond the Outfield - Mark Teague

Tar Beach - Faith Ringgold

Hey Get Off Our Train - John Burningham

Figure 2:

Escaping Reality:

Something is going on between the parents and the child that causes him to escape.

Sometimes the escape just takes place in the children's mind.

When there is a problem, the characters try to escape or go to sleep.

Growing:

Each kid grows up after an encounter or adventure. Sometimes the animals or the room grew.

Growing is the adventure's first step.

In most of these stories, something is growing, usually in the children's imagination.

Windows:

The windows are sometimes the beginning of the adventure.

There are windows so you can see the moon.

You can escape out of windows into the world.

The Moon:

Sometimes the moon is in the window to tell you time has passed without saying it.

It is like clock in the setting.

Change in Character:

Sometimes in their adventures, the characters' perspective changes when they remember something.

The character goes on an adventure and does something to realize that they were wrong about something. They come home after learning it.

In some of the stories, the characters were mean and learned to be nice.

Animals as Catalysts:

The animals were imaginary friends.

The animals were friends that helped the characters get through their troubles and solve their problems.

Sleeping / The Bedroom:

Someone or something makes the character go to his or her room, and it is there that the character finds their friends and leave on an adventure to conquer their troubles.

The parents tell a child to go to their room and in the room they make up a story in their mind and the perspective changes.

Parent / Child Relationships:

The child is mad at the parents and travels on a story or an adventure. When they get back, the parents are mostly right. In the end the child realizes what they did wrong and then come back. In Where the Wild Things Are, Max realizes he was wrong and comes home.

Most of the characters have a mother figure in the story.