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The aim of this study was to investigate preschool teachers' use of picture books for teaching environmental concepts and the conservation of resources. Using an action research approach, twelve children aged 5-6 years old were recruited for this eight-week study. Eight picture books with an environmental education theme were selected for use in these classes. The results revealed that the pupils' knowledge of environmental concepts was higher in the post-test than the pre-test. With regard to the conservation of resources, the children learned to bring their own cotton hankies, use less water when washing their hands and brushing their teeth, and reduce the amount of drawing papers on which they doodled. The children were also persuaded to continue saving energy at home, and demonstrated that they understood that turning off the TV and lights were practical steps they could take to achieve this. Nevertheless, they did not appear to grasp the idea of reusing plastic bags.

For those educators or parents who doubt the prospect of bilingual education and the experience of multilingual literacy learning, reading Becoming Biliterate: Young Children Learning Different Writing Systems might lift a great weight off their minds in knowing that there are successful stories with respect to this issue. The author, Charmian Kenner, reviews a research project that explores a case study of six London six-year-old children becoming biliterate in England. To investigate how young children acquire two different writing systems simultaneously, Kenner, Kress, Al-Khatib, Kam, and Tsai (2004) chose children who learned Chinese, Arabic, or Spanish in community language schools and at the same time learned English literacy at primary schools. The research project included 1 year of participant observation, field notes, videorecording, interviews with teachers and parents, and the collection of students' literacy artifacts. Kenner sees the value of biliteracy and offers evidence that children develop different literacies by exploring how each system works while also developing multimodal skills by using different writing scripts. Hornberger (1990) states, in reference to bilingual literacy, "The more the contexts of individuals' learning allow them to draw on all points of the continua, the greater are the chances for their full biliterate development" (pp. 213-214). With similar emphasis on context, Kenner begins her first chapter analyzing how various contexts like home, community school, and primary school play an important role in cultivating biliteracy. In this chapter, Kenner delineates these settings by delving into cases in Chinese-, Arabic-, and Spanish-speaking families, communities, and schools. In the home setting, parents and siblings take up the role in developing children's multiliteracy. Although not articulated within the book, community language schools are nonprofit organizations established by heritage-language speakers of that cultural group. In my own work with Chinese-language schools, the mission is to pass on the Chinese culture and language to the next generation. In the community, children not only learn their heritage language as a way to maintain cultural links but also receive support for mainstream curriculum. In school contexts, teachers adopt diverse activities to carry out national curriculum and national literacy strategies. Based on these accounts, the reader is able to recognize the multiple learning