Top Five Reasons to Keep Buying Picture Books

By Lisa Jancarik

 

 

A recent New York Times article about chapter books being pushed on younger kids really hit home with me. I had just done some major backpedaling on the whole “transition-to-chapter-books” idea, so reading this gave me the sinking feeling that a lot of well-meaning moms and dads are doing the same thing I had just done (check out NYTimes article).

Not long ago, I read Beverly Cleary’s Ralph and the Motorcycle and the two follow-up books to my daughter as bedtime reading. I had to explain some of the vocabulary to her, but the idea of a plucky little mouse riding a toy motorcycle had sufficiently captured her imagination that she didn’t mind learning a few new words. Great! I thought. I could start to read chapter books to her at bedtime, letting the picture books be stories for her to explore on her own.

Not so fast, Lisa. In spite of our shared enjoyment of Ralph, Young Miss didn’t warm up to Ramona the Pest the way I had expected. In fact, she piped up just as Ramona’s new boots got stuck in the mud to ask if we could switch to Ladybug Girl by David Soman and Jacky Davis. I am embarrassed to tell you that I was disappointed that she wanted me to read her a picture book instead.

Soman and Davis created a delightful story about feeling capable—a theme that resonates deeply with my kindergartener—and they did it without gimmicks like movie or toy tie-ins, stickers or microchips (don’t get me started on books that read to you…it’s a big enough pet peeve for its own post). Shame on me for my momentary dismissal of picture books, and I did relent and switch to reading her bedtime pick instead.

As a kind of atonement for my parenting sin of pushing chapter books on a kid who isn’t really ready for them, I humbly offer the following:

1.  A compelling illustration gets the book picked up and opened in the first place - A good picture is more important than the stickers, brand names or voice chips we sometimes see in modern “book-alikes.” Who can’t picture immediately the art of Eric Carle’s classics or Clement Hurd’s illustrations for Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon? Colorful and silly Dr. Seuss images are some of my own earliest memories of books. Their simple but engaging artwork speaks to kids when their own vocabularies may consist only of a few words and reading for themselves is still years away.

 

2.  Illustrations help to make some pretty abstract ideas more concrete with images - In The Donut Chef, Bob Staake’s wacky pictures of crazy-looking donuts convey the idea that new isn’t automatically better, a concept that passes by a lot of grownups.

 

 

3.  Great illustrations give kids and the adults who read to them reasons to talk and laugh together - The first time I read Ian Lendler’s An Undone Fairy Tale, my kid and I laughed so hard heads turned in Starbucks. I honestly thought we might get kicked out, gold card or no gold card, and the book’s superb illustrations by Whitney Martin were a large factor. I know I’ll carry that joyful memory with me long after my little girl is reading Tolstoy.

 

 

4.  Kids get useful context clues from the images on the page -  For example, the Fancy Nancy series by Jane O'Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser actively seeks to teach kids at my daughter’s reading level new words. My kid actually used the word “dilemma” correctly in a sentence not long after Fancy Nancy arrived on her bookshelf…mind you, I haven’t heard that word from her since then, but it’s still rattling around in her head somewhere. Nancy got there because my daughter liked Nancy’s snazzy threads, and I liked the vocabulary I was seeing inside.

 

 

5.  Great artwork in books gives kids the building blocks to imagine their own stories - My princess-obsessed daughter uses books with pictures of Disney characters as a jumping-off point for the complicated tales she weaves on her own. Ariel and company have had countless adventures while my daughter sat in the doctor’s office, rode in the car or awaited her dinner at our restaurant table. My kid knows the printed stories by heart, but she loves to share with me what’s happening in the pictures when she’s in charge of the storytelling. My mother, the retired schoolteacher, tells me this activity is an important pre-reading skill, but my newly literate kiddo still derives a great deal of pleasure from it.