Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve and is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes exclude young-adult fiction, comic books, or other genres. Books specifically for children existed by the 17th century. Scholarship on children's literature includes professional organizations, dedicated publications and university courses.

Defining children's literature

There is some debate on what constitutes children's literature.

Books written by children
A much-overlooked kind of children's literature is work written by children and young teens, such as The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford (aged nine) or the juvenilia of Jane Austen, written to amuse brothers and sisters. Anne Frank wrote a novel and many short stories in addition to her diary. Barbara Newhall Follett wrote four books, beginning with a novel called The House Without Windows at the age of nine; when the manuscript was destroyed in a fire, she rewrote it from memory. In 1937 two schoolchildren, Pamela Whitlock and Katharine Hull sent their manuscript of The Far-Distant OxustoArthur Ransome, who persuaded his publisher Jonathan Cape to produce it, characterising it as "the best children's book of 1937". Dorothy Straight's How the World Began and S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders are more recent examples.

Books written for children
Perhaps the most common definition of children's literature is those books intentionally written for children. Nancy Anderson, associate professor in the College of Education at the University of South Florida in Tampa, defines children's literature as all books written for children, "excluding works such as comic books, joke books, cartoon books, and nonfiction works that are not intended to be read from front to back, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference material". Some of this work is also very popular among adults. J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series was originally written and marketed for children, but it was so popular among children and adults that The New York Timescreated a separatebestseller list. Often no consensus is reached whether a given work is best categorized as adult or children's literature, and many books are marketed for both adults and children.

Books chosen for children
The most restrictive definition of children's literature are those books various authorities determine are "appropriate" for children, such as teachers, reviewers, scholars, parents, publishers, librarians, retailers, and the various book-award committees.

Parents wishing to protect their children from the unhappier aspects of life often find the traditional fairy tales, nursery rhymes and other voyages of discovery problematic, because often the first thing a story does is remove the adult influence, leaving the central character to learn to cope on his or her own: prominent examples of this include Snow White,Hansel and Gretel,BambiandA Series of Unfortunate Events.

Many see such isolation of child characters from supporting adults as necessary preparation for the transition to adulthood. The school story became a common device for this, beginning with Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) by Thomas Hughes and F.W. Farrar's Eric, or, Little by Little, although the framework had been explored as early as 1749 bySarah Fielding in The Governess, or The Little Female Academy. Life begins for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in theMark Twain stories (1876 and 1885) once Aunt Polly's ineffectual tutelage is shaken off. In the classic British novels Tom's Midnight Garden(Philippa Pearce, 1958) and Jessamy(Barbara Sleigh, 1967), for example, the responsibility is enhanced by isolating the child not just spatially, but in time, through the use of time slip. Arthur Ransome used the device of children acting for themselves extensively in his Swallows and Amazons series (1930–48) and included poignant discussion of it (the "duffer" question in Swallows and AmazonsandSwallowdale).

Books chosen by children
The broadest definition of children's literature applies to books that are actually selected and read by children. Children choose many books, such as comics, which some would not consider to be literature at all in the traditional sense; they also choose literary classics and recognized great works by modern writers, and often enjoy stories which speak on multiple levels. In the opinion of novelist Orson Scott Card, "one can make a good case for the idea that children are often the guardians of the truly great literature of the world, for in their love of story and unconcern for stylistic fads and literary tricks, children unerri

1 History; 2 Published diaries; 3 Journal writing software; 4 Internet diaries.... For example, some diary software now stores entries in encrypted format, ...

Dairy farming is a class of agricultural, or an animal husbandry, enterprise, for long-term production of milk, usually from dairy cows but also from goats and sheep, which may be either processed on-site or transported to a dairy factory for processing and eventual retail sale.

Most dairy farms sell the male calves born by their cows, usually for veal production, or breeding depending on quality of the bull calf, rather than raising non-milk-producing stock. Many dairy farms also grow their own feed, typically including corn, alfalfa, and hay. This is fed directly to the cows, or is stored as silage for use during the winter season.

History

Dairy farming has been part of agriculture for thousands of years. Historically it has been one part of small, diverse farms. In the last century or so larger farms doing only dairy production have emerged. Large scale dairy farming is only viable where either a large amount of milk is required for production of more durable dairy products such as cheese, butter, etc or there is a substantial market of people with cash to buy milk, but no cows of their own.

Hand milking

Centralized dairy farming as we understand it primarily developed around villages and cities, where residents were unable to have cows of their own due to a lack of grazing land. Near the town, farmers could make some extra money on the side by having additional animals and selling the milk in town. The dairy farmers would fill barrels with milk in the morning and bring it to market on a wagon. Until the late 19th century, the milking of the cow was done by hand. In the United States, several large dairy operations existed in some northeastern states and in the west, that involved as many as several hundred cows, but an individual milker could not be expected to milk more than a dozen cows a day. Smaller operations predominated.

For most herds, milking took place indoors twice a day, in a barn with the cattle tied by the neck with ropes or held in place by stanchions. Feeding could occur simultaneously with milking in the barn, although most dairy cattle were pastured during the day between milkings. Such examples of this method of dairy farming are difficult to locate, but some are preserved as a historic site for a glimpse into the days gone by. One such instance that is open for this is at Point ReyesNational Seashore.

Vacuum bucket milking

The first milking machines were an extension of the traditional milking pail. The early milker device fit on top of a regular milk pail and sat on the floor under the cow. Following each cow being milked, the bucket would be dumped into a holding tank. This developed into the Surge hanging milker. Prior to milking a cow, a large wide leather strap called a surcingle was put around the cow, across the cow's lower back. The milker device and collection tank hung underneath the cow from the strap. This innovation allowed the cow to move around naturally during the milking process rather than having to stand perfectly still over a bucket on the floor.

With the availability of electric power and suction milking machines, the production levels that were possible in stanchion barns increased but the scale of the operations continued to be limited by the labor intensive nature of the milking process. Attaching and removing milking machines involved repeated heavy lifting of the machinery and its contents several times per cow and the pouring of the milk into milk cans. As a result, it was rare to find single-farmer operations of more than 50 head of cattle.

Step-Saver milk transport

As herd size began to increase, the bucket milker system became laborious. A vacuum milk-transport system known as the Step-Saver was developed to transport milk to the storage tank. The system used a long vacuum hose coiled around a receiver cart, and connected to a vacuum-breaker device in the milkhouse, allowing farmers to milk many cows without the necessity of walking increasingly longer distances carrying heavy buckets of milk.

Milking pipeline

The next innovation in automatic milking was the milk pipeline. This uses a permanent milk-return pipe and a second vacuum pipe that encircles the barn or milking parlor above the rows of cows, with quick-seal entry ports above each cow. By eliminating the need for the milk container, the milking device shrank in size and weight to the point where it could hang under the cow, held up only by the sucking force of the milker nipples on the cow's udder. The milk is pulled up into the milk-return pipe by the vacuum system, and then flows by gravity to the milkhouse vacuum-breaker that puts the milk in the storage tank. The pipeline system greatly reduced the physical labor of milking since the farmer no longer needed to carry around huge heavy buckets of milk from each cow.

The pipeline allowed barn length to keep increasing and expanding, but after a point farmers started to milk the cows in large groups, filling the barn with one-half to one-third of the herd, milking the animals, and then emptying and refilling the barn. As herd sizes continued to increase, this evolved into the more efficient milking parlor.

Milking parlors

Innovation in milking focused on mechanizing the milking parlor to maximize throughput of cows per operator which streamlined the milking process to permit cows to be milked as if on an assembly line, and to reduce physical stresses on the farmer by putting the cows on a platform slightly above the person milking the cows to eliminate having to constantly bend over. Many older and smaller farms still have tie-stall or stanchion barns, but worldwide a majority of commercial farms have parlors.

The milking parlor allowed a concentration of money into a small area, so that more technical monitoring and measuring equipment could be devoted to each milking station in the parlor. Rather than simply milking into a common pipeline for example, the parlor can be equipped with fixed measurement systems that monitor milk volume and record milking statistics for each animal. Tags on the animals allow the parlor system to automatically identify each animal as it enters the parlor.

Recessed parlors

More modern farms use recessed parlors, where the milker stands in a recess such that his arms are at the level of the cow's udder. Recessed parlors can be herringbone, where the cows stand in two angled rows either side of the recess and the milker accesses the udder from the side, parallel, where the cows stand side-by-side and the milker accesses the udder from the rear or, more recently, rotary (or carousel), where the cows are on a raised circular platform, facing the center of the circle, and the platform rotates while the milker

An activity book is a type of book, generally aimed at children, which contains interactive content such as games, puzzles, quizzes, pictures to colour and other elements which involve writing or drawing in the book itself. The book may, or may not, have a loose narrative or contain other non-interactive elements structured around the interactive elements. Activity books may be made for entertainment, education or a mixture of both.

Specific types of activity book include colouring books and puzzle books. A book is normally referred to as an activity book if it combines a variety of interactive elements and does not fall neatly into one of these more specific categories.

Examples

Where's Wally?

The Where's Wally series of books (known as Where's Waldo in the USA) by Martin Handford consists of both puzzle books, where the reader must search for characters hidden in pictures, and activity books such as Where's Waldo?: The Ultimate Fun Book, which include a wider range of games and activities as well as the normal puzzles.

Horrible Histories

The Horrible Histories series by Terry Deary, and its spin-offs, include a number of educational activity books.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

The Diary of a Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Book by Jeff Kinney is an activity book which contains space for readers to keep a written or drawn diary or journal as well Wimpy Kid-themedas puzzles and cartoons.