ABSTRACT
This is an exciting time for literature, imagination, storytelling and children’s digital lives. Literature has always been an important presence in the English and literacy curriculum, sometimes hovering in the sidelines, sometimes dominating other dimensions, or sometimes working in an integrated partnership with literacy and language. In a time when digital texts and stories are a vivid and pervasive part of young people’s worlds, the opportunity is here for literature that includes digital texts to take its place alongside other forms—picture books, novels, poems, plays and the like—to be an integral part of curriculum; that is, to be approached in ways that enhance and deepen pleasure and appreciation, children’s understandings of texts and how they work, and their understandings of the nature of reading, of themselves, and of the world. Working with literary texts creates opportunities for imagination, creativity and play, and there is no good reason why this should not include games.
