Not So Simple Picture Books

The book’s sub-title is a bit of a giveaway - ‘Developing Responses to Literature with 4-12 year-olds’. Literature? Why not developing responses to Art? Look elsewhere, then -to Jane Doonan and Brian Alderson amongst others - for an approach to picture book narrative that doesn’t implicitly prioritise words. That said, what makes this book special are the transcripts, page after page of them, which demonstrate how teachers as skilled as Pam Baddeley and Chris Eddershaw can encourage children to explore what they see.