Book-Making for Preschool Children With Developmental Delays

The purpose of this project was to explore the implementation of an inter-professional collaborative classroom-based book-making intervention with preschool children with developmental delays. The current study utilizes elements of an analytic autoethnography style, a qualitative ethnographic research method where it is typical for researchers to interact with the people they are researching in a deep, prolonged way to gain a rich understanding of the phenomenon they are studying. Results show that children with developmental delays transitioned through emergent writing stages and stages of narrative development, as well as developed a sense of agency as authors. The theoretical foundation for and results from this study suggest that a collaborative, classroom-based book-making intervention may benefit emergent writing, oral language, and writer/author agency for preschool children identified with developmental disabilities.