Gopnik, & Ganea, in press). But the logic behind both suggestions can be explained using the mise en place construct (Weisberg et al., 2014), which highlights the crucial role played by children’s atti-tudes toward a learning environment. Children hearing books about realistic themes may see these bookreading sessions as more “business as usual,” and may not bring their full attention and engage-ment to the task. But children hearing books about fantastical themes may use the impossible or unusual nature of this situation as a clue to engage more fully, because something in this situation is special and different.
Finally, when thinking about constructing potential classroom interventions, the reasons behind the effect become somewhat less important than the effect itself. Our results strongly suggest that including fantastical themes in preschool classrooms can be highly beneficial to children’s learning of new vocabulary. Such themes may benefit children’s learning of other facts and skills as well, and as such merit inclusion in the curriculum.