ABSTRACT
Look at any nursery or primary school collection and you will find a good number of nonfiction texts for children that are organized chronologically: life cycles, journeys and biographies, for example. Teachers know that children respond readily to chronological texts; after all we plan and live our lives in a time sequence, think and even dream in this way. Very young children are familiar with this kind of organization and their oral recounts of what they have been doing are narratives. The power of the chronological and the narrative as a way of relating to and organizing our world is explored in a well-known essay by Barbara Hardy entitled ‘Narrative as a Primary Act of Mind’ (Hardy, 1977).
