The Contemporary Children's Literature, Children will like to read.

                                   

Contemporary Children’s literature should reflect the problems of today. Children are exposed to crime, death, kidnappings, boko haram, internally displaced people, and violence on T.V.

Children’s literature should include the realities of life and create avenues so that children can talk about their reactions to real life. Children literature should not include emotions that are not felt by children. Children do not understand nostalgia, so they always look towards the future.

Children do not feel despair, they always have hope in any circumstances.

Children do not know cynicism, so they won’t understand cynicism in plot.

Children are curious about life and adult activities, all their childhood plays are re-enacted towards what they see the adults doing. So they enact plays about family, going to the market, going to work and driving cars and sometimes death. A child may lie down pretending to sleep when she wants to show you how a character died on T.V.

When talking about my book'' my life as an Almajiri,'' a nine year old girl summarised the plot to me, she talked with her hands and an expressive face but when she got to a character’s death. She grew quiet for a minute and clasped her hands together and stared at her hands before she said the character died in a car accident.

In my childhood we never said the word death, we treated it with reverence and when a classmate lost her twin. We didn’t really understand when the teacher told us our classmate had left, so we asked the twin and she told us he had gone on a long journey to a different land and she pointed to the Sky.

I was listening to a seven year old read in a summer reading program at American corner Abuja when he said ‘‘boko haram are killing everybody, you have to be careful,’’.

I asked him about the books he liked to read and he said he liked books about Tigers.

I asked him why, he told me they were beautiful, wild and free.

Children have different tastes in book like adults; an eleven year old girl who wore dresses told me she liked reading books about princesses. She wore a pink dress and twirled the flower on her dress when she told me shyly that she wanted to be a princess.

Another eleven year old girl only read detective books, and she knew who was reading all the books she liked.

A nine year old girl and an eight year old boy only wanted to read the magic bus stories. The girl said she liked books about space.They told me science was cool whilst another eight year old boy wanted to read books about sports especially football.A quiet eleven year old girl only wanted to read about girls living   two hundred years ago, she told me she wanted to know about how people lived in the past. Then she looked at me with a look I know, I was eating up her reading time.

Children will like to read entertaining books with imagination, experience from daily or past lives,princesses, sports,space and Tigers.