Genres • 9-11 Year Olds

The features and styles present in a children's book aimed for the age range of 9-11 year olds

Once a child reaches the age of around 9-11 years, they are already familiar with a wide variety of children's books, and have read about an array of different adventures, learnt their alphabet, colours and numbers - and in doing so, they've become a tougher audience to please.

Once a child begins to approach their final years of primary schooling, they are normally by this age looking towards reading longer books, with more text in than what they were comfortable with around the age of 5 years old. This means it's imperative the story itself is compelling enough to keep a child with such an active imagination satisfied without the aid of illustration. Although, illustration is not entirely out of bounds for children of this age group, with children's book collections such as Roald Dahl books and Dr. Seuss' books, the incorporation of image and text brings a character and light to the stories - which, as stories themselves, work perfectly as stand-alone books with no added illustration.

It's not just fiction books that keep children of this age group enthralled. For children exploring a whole new world of education and puzzles, sometimes the stories that a real can seem the most interesting. It's no longer just about monsters, fairies and far away lands, these books are about how your body really works, and how animals stay alive out in the wild, and how vehicles such as aeroplanes and cars work. This information may be a little too much for younger children to grasp a hold of, however children between the ages of 9-11 find themselves not only being introduced to this information in schools and conversation, but they can see it come to life in illustrated books such as 'How My Body Works' illustrated by Frances Cony. In these books, every single element of the human body comes to life in a way easy for children to understand - cells have little bodies, faces and personalities of their own and work together not only to avoid any problems that arise, but to also keep their body moving and working. This makes the science not only informative and fun, but also relatable. 

To summarise, whether or not a children's book aimed for 9-11 year olds is fiction or non-fiction - there's definitely an art to getting the stories and information inside to captivate their young, impressionable and imaginative minds. Unlike books aimed at younger children, these books are more text-heavy rather than reliant on images, however, just like any any children's book, images play an important role in helping literate and accompany the text, for characterisation, personification and confirmation comprehension purposes.