CLAT Level III: Children's Literature Application Test

Instructions: CLAT is designed to test your knowledge of child readers. Please read the following items carefully before choosing your answers. Do not peek at the solutions. Whenever you don’t know the answer, guess. (We recommend the number 3 and the letter B when all else fails.) Do the best you can. Good luck!

Item 1

Three fourth-grade girls are traveling on an uptown bus after school in heavy traffic at 3 mph. Girl One is reading Judy Blume’s Blubber. Girl Two is reading Mike Lupica’s Travel Team. Girl Three is listening to her iPod and staring out the window. [ANSWER]

A.	Girl One has certainly been bullied in school.	True ___	False ___
B.	Girl Two wishes she were a boy.	True ___	False ___
C.	Girl Three hates books.	True ___	False ___

Item 2

Three fourth-grade boys are traveling on the same uptown bus in heavy traffic at 3 mph. Boy One is tossing a ball up and down, eliciting angry glares from nearby adults. Boy Two is playing a game on his cell phone. Boy Three is reading James Howe’s The Misfits. [ANSWER]

A.	Boy One is obsessed with sports.	True ___	False ___
B.	Boy Two never reads of his own volition.	True ___	False ___
C.	Boy Three has certainly been bullied at school.	True ___	False ___

Item 3

A concerned parent at a parent-teacher conference tells the teacher that she’s at her wits’ end because her son is only reading sports magazines. What should the teacher do? [ANSWER]

	A.	Recommend they give the boy some Dan Gutman, John R. Tunis, or Mike Lupica books.
	B.	Recommend they get him a tutor.
	C.	Tell the parents to leave him alone.
	D.	Advise the parents to terminate their subscription to Sports Illustrated and not let him watch sports on TV.

Item 4

An enthusiastic young teacher comes to the school librarian, worried about the negative energy in his classroom due to the domination of a few alpha girls. Certain that he can address this problem with a Literature Unit, he asks the librarian for book recommendations. Which book set will the librarian give him? [ANSWER]

	A.	Poison Ivy, The Girls, The Misfits, and other books involving school bullying situations.
	B.	The Bad Beginning, Cirque du Freak, Coraline, and other scary stories with horrifying outsized bullies that make real ones appear insignificant.
	C.	M.L.K: Journey of a King, Tasting the Sky, and other books about conflicts far larger than those of the classroom.
	D.	The Clique, Gossip Girl, A-List, and other series that will be familiar territory for the alpha girls.

Item 5

Match each child with his or her book(s). Draw a line between the child and what he or she is reading. [ANSWER]

Bobby is six

Maria is seven

Tiffany is eight

Jinhuan is nine

Joe is ten

Lily is eleven

David is twelve

Knuffle Bunny Too

My Father’s Dragon

Betsy-Tacy

Tintin

My Teacher Is an Alien

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Eragon

Guinness Book of
World Records

Tangerine

Ender’s Game

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Looking for Alaska

Great Expectations

Item 6

Translate the following two sentences: “This book is so boring!” and “This is such a stupid book!” [ANSWER]

Item 7

Read the following dialogue and answer the question at the end.

LIBRARIAN:	Ermandi. I haven’t seen you since school started! Is sixth grade so busy?
ERMANDI:	Yeah. We have so much work! I have like two minutes to pick a book for winter break. Can you help me?
LIBRARIAN:	Sure. You still like mystery and suspense books?
ERMANDI:	Yup.
LIBRARIAN:	How about this one [The View from the Cherry Tree, 1975 hardcover edition]? It’s about a boy who witnessed a murder but couldn’t get anyone to believe him.
ERMANDI:	Um . . . I’m not sure.
LIBRARIAN:	This one [Stormbreaker, 2002 paperback edition] is good: It’s about a boy who works as a spy for the MI6.
ERMANDI:	It looks weird.
LIBRARIAN:	This one [Silent to the Bone, 2000 hardcover edition] is about a boy who is accused of trying to hurt his stepsister and his friend is trying to prove him innocent.
ERMANDI:	I don’t know . . . Hey, how about this other one? This looks interesting.
LIBRARIAN:	Oh, okay. That’s the paperback edition of the book I just told you about — the stepsister story.
ERMANDI:	I want it.
LIBRARIAN:	Sure. Let’s check it out for you.

Explain why Ermandi took home the paperback edition of Silent to the Bone but passed all the other books shown to him, even though the librarian is sure that a mystery lover like Ermandi would have enjoyed all of them. [ANSWER]

Item 8

Victoria is a high school junior who has only a couple of peers that she considers friends. She is often found loudly monopolizing conversations and does not realize how annoyingly self-centered she can be. Victoria does not participate in most school activities and is highly judgmental of and cynical about others’ community service–oriented efforts. Priya is Victoria’s classmate. She is well loved by her peers and teachers and often has lively and meaningful conversations with others. Priya is involved in many community service projects to help those around her and in other parts of the world. What can we deduce about these two girls? [ANSWER]

	A.	Priya has been a longtime literature lover since she started reading at age five. Her favorite books are Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Stardust, and Winnie-the-Pooh.
	B.	Victoria likes watching reality TV shows and does not understand how on earth anyone could stand reading classics, unless forced to for English classes.
	C.	Victoria has been a longtime literature lover since she started reading at age five. Her favorite books are Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Stardust, and Winnie-the-Pooh.
	D.	Priya likes watching reality TV shows and does not understand how on earth anyone could stand reading classics, unless forced to for English classes.
	E.	Not enough data were given to make even the slightest assumption about these two girls’ reading habits.

Answer Key

1. Each correct answer is worth 1 point.

	A.	False. She is reading this one to add to her “collection” of Judy Blume books (having read most of the others already).
	B.	False. She is reading Travel Team because the boy she has had a crush on since second grade just did a book-sharing in class and she figured that if she reads what he likes, he will pay attention to her. Normally, she would have been reading Patricia Reilly Giff’s Eleven.
	C.	False. She just finished reading Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and has started listening to them on her iPod because she didn’t want to leave that world. [BACK]

2. Each correct answer is worth 1 point.

	A.	False. He is angry because a classmate checked out the last copy of Inkheart, which he’s been dying to read.
	B.	True. He never reads.
	C.	False. He has to finish The Misfits for school because his class is doing an “anti-bullying” unit and the report is due tomorrow. [BACK]

3. The correct answer, worth 2 points, is C. [BACK]

4. 1 point if your answer is B. 3 points if you answered the following:

None. The librarian does not believe that one should use children’s literature to
teach anything other than the enjoyment of and appreciation of literature. [BACK]

5. For each correct match, award half a point. For each incorrect match, deduct half a point.

Six-year-old Bobby’s parents are ecstatic that he is lugging about Eragon, a book as big as he is. It does take him most of first grade to read it, but his parents and grandparents sure don’t care! (Secret exposed: parts of it were read to him.)

Seven-year-old Maria has been obsessed with Harry Potter since kindergarten because of her stepbrother, now in high school, who has been a big fan of the series since the first book came out. (Secret exposed: Maria can’t go to sleep without her plush Hedwig.)

Ever since eight-year-old Tiffany saw Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants at a sleepover birthday party, it has been her favorite movie. (Secret exposed: her mother has no idea that there are many more PG-13 things going on in the book than in the movie.)

Nine-year-old Jinhuan gets to read whatever he chooses from the library. (Secret exposed: we think he chooses well.)

Ten-year-old Joe began reading when he was two, moving speedily from Dr. Seuss to Doctor Dolittle. By then his thrilled father had started a blog in order to record every book Joe read. (Secret exposed: Joe cannot bear to disappoint his father.)

Eleven-year-old Lily hasn’t read any of these titles. (Secret exposed: she does read, just not these books!)

Twelve-year-old David is a preteen going on twenty-five. (Secret exposed: he has a MySpace page, too.) [BACK]

6. Score 2 points for each answer resembling one of the following:
       • This book is too hard for my reading ability.
       • I don’t get this author’s kind of humor.
       • The characters/events in this book are too strange.
       • The characters/events in this book are too ordinary.
       • I just don’t like fantasy (or mystery, realistic fiction, sad stories, science fiction,
           girly books, historical fiction, boy books, nonfiction, fiction, biography, funny
           books, etc.). [BACK]

7. Score 2 points for an explanation resembling the following:

Like many readers (children and adults), Ermandi responds viscerally to book covers and trim sizes. When he couldn’t spend more time exploring the contents of each title, he had little choice but to rely on his first impressions. [BACK]

	C.	(1 point): This is true, although there is little correlation between Victoria’s reading habits and her personality traits.
	D.	(1 point): This is true, although there is little correlation between Priya’s reading habits and her personality traits.
	E.	(2 points): It is always best not to assume. [BACK]

Results

20 and higher: Our hats are off to you! We wouldn’t have done as well . . . even though we think that we know kid readers, and even though we know that they come in all shapes and sizes. You just can never predict.

15–20: Congratulations! You are well on your way to become a wonderfully understanding and skilled educator or school librarian!

10–15: Hmmm . . . could it be that you need more direct experience with children and their literature? Or that you are giving books too much power?

0–10: Are you sure that you are not miscalculating your score?

• • •

We hope that you enjoyed taking this test, which was based on the following long-held beliefs:

Never assume. Every year we interact with children new to us, children we already know, remixed classes of those children, and a myriad of other situations, giving us constant new and altered puzzlements. And we often discover that what we think we know for sure . . . we don’t.

Trust readers. Time and again we watch children select books that appear to be too hard for them. Sometimes the child will eventually abandon the book as it was indeed too difficult, but sometimes the child will be highly motivated to read the book and enjoy every hard page of it. By letting them take these books, by saying nothing to discourage them, we show children that we trust them to decide for themselves.

Peers are powerful. While the enthusiastic recommendations of teachers and librarians matter, those of kids can matter even more. We have watched many a book or series (Harry Potter, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Candyfloss) become enormously popular due to word of mouth.

Collecting counts. Over and over we have observed the enjoyment many children, just like many adults, derive from collecting things: all the titles in a series, all the books by an author, all the books on a topic, or everything in a particular genre.

Design matters. A book speaks to its readers not only via the text but also through its cover art, trim size, interior decorations, font choices, and other design aspects.

Books are literature. While the best books invariably provoke important conversations about love, courage, community, exclusion/inclusion, social justice, and other life issues, we prefer to select books for our students to consider as literature rather than as teaching tools, confident that all those other issues will be an organic part of the classroom experience.

Value art for art’s sake. We believe strongly that books are works of art and that any form of art is crucial in anyone’s life. It does not have to serve another purpose other than to bring deep and satisfying pleasure to one’s life. While we both are addicted to reading, we know that reading does not necessarily make someone a better person. We both have encountered avid readers who do not prove to be upright citizens of the community. Similarly, we are not alarmed when a child turns out to be a nonreader. There are so many forms of art and entertainment, so many character-building activities in life. Just because a child is a nonreader, it doesn’t mean he or she won’t turn out to be a successful and contributing member of the world.

And so, to end by paraphrasing Lewis Carroll’s Dodo, everybody has passed, and all must have grades. Take your pick:

A+

√++

Candy

A medal

A punched-in-the-air fist accompanied by
one or both of us yelling, “All right!”

Nothing from us, just your intrinsic
feeling of a job well done.

The test administrators are Monica Edinger, fourth-grade teacher at the Dalton School in New York City, and Roxanne Hsu Feldman, Dalton’s middle school librarian. In the years before preparing the test they read, worked with children and their books in school libraries and classrooms, read some more, watched children, developed many curriculum units, read still more, paid attention to how children live their lives, advised parents, read, never assumed, and read some more.