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Using Picturebooks in the Classroom
In an article primarily for teachers but full of useful suggestions for librarians and parents too, Mary Roche explores the unique ability of picturebooks to open up the world to children.
Irrespective of our age or experience, books can provide us with solace, escapism, information and inspiration. Michael Rosen asserts that they form our earliest experiences and can influence our future success as learners:
‘A book-oriented home environment, we argue, endows children with tools that are directly useful in learning at school: vocabulary, information, comprehension skills, imagination, broad horizons of history and geography, familiarity with good writing, understanding of the importance of evidence in argument and many others.’ Michael Rosen
Along with such cognitive benefits, books can also be sources of empathy, healing and support.
…reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others… A 2011 study …showed that, when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings. The New Yorker
We all need to be made to think and feel as we read. We need to have our knowledge extended, our horizons broadened, our experiences expanded, our empathy built and our vocabulary developed. We can do all of that alone, certainly, but discussing books together engages us at a much higher-level and exposes us to ways of thinking that solo reading might not. Children who live in book-rich environments are lucky, but many do not, so schools can play a huge role in mitigating this deficit. It follows then that classrooms need to be resourced with good reading material to cater for diverse readers.
For several decades of my teaching career I engaged children in discussion around picturebooks, using an approach I called ‘Critical Thinking and Book Talk’ (Roche 2010). Much of my research is described and explained in Developing Children’s Critical Thinking through Picturebooks (Roche 2015). Throughout that book I argue that picturebooks can be useful at all levels of education: they should not be relegated to the junior classes.
Sophisticated picturebooks are far more than mere illustrated texts. Good picturebooks are a marriage of image and text and there is no redundant line or word as author and illustrator narrate together. Good picturebooks provide gaps for the reader to fill, in text and images alike. They never reveal all. They call on high levels of comprehension and meaning making via the images and pictures and they are sufficiently open-ended so that each of us can bring our own prior knowledge to the process of making sense. Shared, they can provide food for thought long after the reading event itself has finished. I argue throughout my book that picturebooks can provide much needed opportunities for thinking, talking and criticality to pre-literate and literate children. They are of immense value in the home, but arguably even more valuable in school where they can help teachers address that deficit in being read to and talked with, that is experienced by many children.
In classrooms, picturebooks lend themselves easily to cross-curricular topics. For example, the following books all relate to the topic of relationships: Watt’s Scaredy Squirrel Makes a Friend; Yates’ Frank and Teddy Make Friends; Hills’ Duck, Duck Goose; Jeffers’ The Way Back Home; Gravett’s Wolf Won’t Bite; Willis’ Mole’s Sunrise; Cave and Riddell’s Something Else; Fox and Vivas’ Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge; On Sudden Hill by Sarah and Davies: textless books like Lehman’s The Red Book, Becker’s The Journey, Tan’s The Arrival, and The Rules of Summer.
Maths
Likewise, there are lots of picturebooks that encourage dialogue about Maths: Burningham’s The Shopping Basket; Scieszka and Smith’s Math Curse; Allen’s Who Sank the Boat?; Pappas’ The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat; Gravett’s The Rabbit Problem; Hutchins’ Clocks, Clocks and More Clocks; Fox and Denton’s Night Noises and so on. There is a huge selection of books for examining the concepts of number, counting, addition, subtraction, shape, space, money/shopping, time, seasons, months etc.
Science and nature
Books like Wallace and Bostok’s Think of an Eel teach concepts like lifecycles; expand vocabulary and present a complete aesthetic experience. Marc Martin’s A River, and books by authors such as Jeannie Baker help children explore their world. Pringle and Lamme (2005) say that children must be given a multitude of opportunities to probe, poke, and peek into their own backyards or galaxies far away. These opportunities, they add, can be supported by the wealth of information available in science picture books.
Picture books about animals, when scientifically accurate, have the advantage of presenting children with close up pictures. A picture book can do a lot that cannot be accomplished in a classroom. The pictures freeze time, so a reader can pore over the details in a way that would never happen if the animal were moving… (Pringle and Lamme 2005 p 2).
Young’s Seven Blind Mice can lead to huge discussion about the importance of diligent investigation and accurate research – a must for all scientific endeavours. Banyai’s Zoom shows the importance of close looking. Nothing is what it seems to be and this book is fantastic for prediction. Frazee’s Roller Coaster examines motion and forces in a delightful way. Barrett’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs offers a zany introduction to a discussion on the study of weather; likewise Wiesner’s Sector 7 kept a group of my 9 year olds engaged in discussion for over an hour and led to a project on clouds. Wenzel’s They all Saw a Cat shows children how different our perspectives on the world can be.
History and Social Studies
There are countless picturebooks available that provide rich opportunities to discuss aspects of history and social studies syllabi at all levels of school. Prior to introducing my pupils to the their first study of ancient civilisations, we examined and explored what ‘a civilization’ or ‘culture’ meant by reading and discussing Fleischman and Hawkes’ Weslandia. This book lends itself hugely to further cross-curricular work. Vocabulary can be expanded by learning the meaning of words such as staple crop, tuber, morale, scornful, civilisation; all the facets of culture can be explored – language, clothing, food, music, art, writing system, counting system, currency and so on; the botany of plants and the science of seed dispersal is there for exploration, as are binary and deanery maths and Wesley’s new mathematical system. Music and musical instruments can be examined, as can studying the constellations, and then there is the philosophical area of how people in early civilizations began to make sense of their existence and purpose on the earth.
Fleischman has also written the text for a wonderful book called The Matchbox Diary. Illustrated by Ibatoulline, this book would provide a rich stepping stone for beginning to understand what history is really about. It could provide a springboard to discussion on immigration and provide a way to develop empathy and tolerance of immigrants. Tan’s The Arrival would make a good partner for this book as would Sanna’s The Journey; Milner’s My Name is Not Refugee, and Hest and Lynch’s When Jessie Came Across the Sea. William’s Archie’s War uses the hand-drawn pictures of a fictionalised ten year old Archie Albright to tell the story of living in England during the period of the First World War.
History is often about how one small event triggers a tsunami of other events. Flora’s The Day the Cow Sneezed is a great way to introduce this idea, as are: Aardema, Leo and Dillon’s Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears, Chaconas and Hellenbrand’s Don’t Slam the Door and Crummel and Donohoe’s All in One Hour. Elsie Piddock Skips in her Sleep by Farjeon and Voake is a recent addition to my picturebooks collection. The story was first published in 1937 and provides us with a wonderful vignette of village life in Sussex at the turn of the 20 th century.
Carol Hurst, on her Children’s Literature website recommends several books for getting children to realise the importance of perspective (Banyai’s Zoom), of how history is contextualised (Bunting’s Fly Away Home) and of how events do not happen in a vacuum (Macaulay’s Black and White; Graham’s Silver Buttons, for example). There are myriads of books dealing with the topic of colonisation, and I would begin with McKee’s The Conquerors, which is perfect for beginning to understand the complexity of issues such as cultural influence, coercion, and the colonisation of minds. Yolen and Shannon’s Encounter is an excellent resource for beginning to understand how cultures collide when Christopher Columbus arrives in The New World. Another book with this theme, and told in a partly allegorical way from the perspective of the colonised, is The Rabbits by Marsden and Tan. Books that deal with the causes of conflict are also plentiful: think of McKee’s Tusk Tusk and Six Men, and Popov’s Why?
Older children can examine books such as Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Coerr and Himler; My Hiroshima by Morimoto; and Faithful Elephants: A True Story of People, Animals and War by Tsuchiya and Lewin. Each of these books examines true stories that can allow children an insight into how dreadful events like war impact on helpless individuals and helpless creatures alike. Another ‘Holocaust’ book, but one with a more joyful message, is Wild and Vivas’ Let the Celebrations Begin. Poole and Barrett’s Anne Frank provides an excellent introduction to discussions about intolerance and racial hatred as does The Harmonica by Johnston and Mazellan. Radunsky’s What Does Peace Feel Like could help children examine and explore all the different possibilities of meaning of the word ‘peace’, by inviting them to imagine what experiencing peace through the five senses would be like. The book begins and ends with translations of ‘peace’ into nearly 200 different languages. The central message is that all people have the creative power to imagine and create a more peaceful world by working together. Cowhey’s Black Ants and Buddhists: Thinking Critically and Teaching Differently in the Primary Grades is a good teacher resource for encouraging thinking about peace.
Citizenship
Citizenship and communal responsibility can be discussed through reading several Dr Seuss’ books such as Yertle the Turtle, The Sneetches, The Lorax, The Butter Battle Book and Horton Hears a Who. These books can lead to discussions arising from questions such as: What is a citizen? What is a community? What is a citizen’s responsibility to their community? (See Libresco, Balantic and Kipling 2011). Look at Last Stop on Market Street by de la Pena also.
Visual art
Picturebooks that deal with the subject of art include: Althés’ I am an Artist; Yates’ Dog Loves Drawing; Ish and The Dot by Reynolds. I particularly like A is for Art: an abstract alphabet by Stephen T Johnson; The First Drawing by Gerstein; Henri’s Scissors by Winter, and The Day the Crayons Quit by Jeffers. Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Leoni, and Mayhew’s Katie series are very useful for discussing colour as is My Many Coloured Days by Dr Seuss. Art and Max by Wiesner presents a quirky and philosophical look at art that could lead to some illuminating insights. The Ink Garden of Brother Theophane could provide children with a link between RE, Art and History Picturebooks are also a rich and valuable resources for ‘looking and responding to art’. Children quickly recognise the style of artists such as Anthony Browne, Mo Willems, Eric Carle, David McKee, Satoshi Kitamura or PJ Lynch. They could discuss how they think the artist created the pictures and what medium/colours were used.
Music
Begin with Stinson and Petricic’s The Man with the Violin. Based on a true incident, it has the added advantage of having lots of internet links both to the incident itself and to Joshua Bell. This book allows us to engage in very philosophical thinking and discussion about the transformative power of music and the perception we have of what counts as ‘good’ music and ‘good’ musicians. For young children, picturebooks that link with the music curriculum could include: Moss and Priceman’s Zin, Zin Zin a Violin; Lach’s Can You Hear it? (which links art and music); Flannery and Stamper’s In the Hall of the Mountain King; Raschka’s Charlie Parker Played Be Bop, and Quentin Blake’s classic Mister Magnolia. Other books deal with music more covertly: Posy Simmonds’ Fred is a story about a lazy cat (now deceased) who had been leading a double life as Famous Fred – the Elvis of the Cat-World.
As well as reading books about music you can try turning books into musical performances. My pupils and I turned several of Julia Donaldson’s books into ‘songs’ particularly the chorus parts of stories like George The Smartest Giant in Town and The Gruffalo. Rosen and Oxenbury’s We’re all Going on a Bear Hunt just begs for an accompanying ‘soundtrack’ as does Rosen and Reynold’s There’s a Bear in a Cave. Books such as Smallman and Pedlar’s Don’t Wake the Bear! and Mo Willems’ That is Not a Good Idea, and Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus lend themselves to choral work. We might encourage discussion on why some books lend themselves to a musical interpretation more than others. This might highlight the idea of rhythm, rhyme, repetitive choruses, the onomatopoeic elements etc.
Drama
With very little expertise a teacher could use virtually all picturebooks as opportunities for drama. The elements of drama such as hot-seating, conscience alley, freeze-framing and thought-tracking, narration and so on, can all be employed to enhance comprehension but again, just as in music above, a caveat prevails: I would encourage teachers to discuss why certain books or scenes or characters or events are suited to dramatic interpretation.
Finally – a caveat
The primary purpose of my CT&BT approach (Roche 2010) is to encourage classroom talk and critical thinking. I would caution about finishing a classroom discussion and immediately asking the class to do a task based on the book. This turns an authentic dialogic experience into what children perceive as teacher-focused ‘work’ and they may eventually stop engaging wholeheartedly in the discussion if they know that, following it, there will be some kind of ‘regular school task’.
[Note: some of the material here is adapted from Chapter 7 of Mary Roche’s book Developing Children’s Critical Thinking through Picturebooks (Roche 2015) and is used with publisher’s permission]
Following a career in primary education, Mary Roche lectured on primary English in MIC (B Ed) and on Action Research (M Ed) in UCC and is currently a lecturer in St Patrick’s Campus MIC, Thurles.
References
Evans, M., Kelley, J., Sikora, J. and Treiman, D (2010) ‘Family scholarly culture and educational success: books and schooling in 27 nations’. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 28 (2010) 171-197.
Hurst, C. (nd) Children’s Literature. Online, available Accessed 6 June 2017
Libresco, A.S., Balantic, J. and Kipling, J.C. (2011) Every Book is a Social Studies Book. Libraries Unlimited: Santa Barbara, CA.
New Yorker (2015) Can Reading Make You Happier? Article by Ceridwen Dovey available online accessed June 15th 2017
Pringle, R. and Lamme, L. (2005) Picture storybooks and science learning, Reading Horizons, (46)1
Roche, M. (2010) Critical Thinking and Book Talk: using picturebooks to promote discussion and critical thinking in the classroom. Reading News (Conference Ed). Literacy Association of Ireland: Dublin
Roche, M. (2015) Developing Children Critical Thinking through Picturebooks. Oxon: Routledge
Rosen, M. (2012) Blogspot Wed 4 Jan 2012. Online, available: http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.ie/2012/01/books-books- books.html accessed 6 June 2017
If you want to learn more about picturebooks my Padlet might be useful
Contact Mary via Twitter @marygtroche or via email marygtroche@gmail.com.