Picture books for young readers, a think out loud

Working for Zoobean and having two kids under 4, I have a lot of time to encounter and think about picture books for children.

Here are a couple points that I've been trying to sort through:

1. The reality on the ground in our home is that we have a 4 year old reading material for kids several years older.
2. Reports from other parents and the New York Times suggest that "real chapter books" are the goal, picture books are for babies and non-readers. 
3. We've heard rumors that publishers are responding to a market for young readers and are supporting books that are age appropriate in content but complex enough for children reading above grade level.

The "early reader" books aimed at children in school learning to read are really hit and miss in content for our daughter. This is true even within the subset of "early reader" books that don't just patently suck in content and illustration, particularly the movie spin offs. So within the subset that are generally good, the animal stories are better than that school oriented stories. Given that most kids learn to read after they go to school, I understand why there are school oriented stories, but in our situation, because she's reading before school there are references she totally doesn't understand, sometimes to the point where most of the story is inaccessible. 

Another young reader who's 6 months older than our daughter has been headed toward Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, that kind of stuff. I think whenever we get there, we'll have a better chance to see if there really are new books that are written for young, advanced readers. Thus far, those rumors are just rumors. At this point, just because our child might be able to read Harry Potter books, I don't think we're going to rush there. Just the other night, we had a tearful discussion about death, heaven, and such. At her age, she's just very literal and concrete. 

With that literalness and concreteness, my current strategy is to send her back into the regular population of picture books. This ends up addressing several issues. First, sometimes, she's just so enthralled with sounding out words, I'm not sure she's working through what's happening in the story. The pictures provide an anchor point for the content. 

Second, she recently announced that she only wants to read "Level 1" readers because they are for Pre-K and she's in Pre-K. The levels vary widely by publisher, but she's comfortably reading most Level 2 books and Level 3 books are simply taxing on her stamina, not her ability to read. So getting out of the "Level #" books will remove this issue. Also within picture books, there is a wide variation in the complexity of content and vocabulary, so there are certainly books that will work for her reading abilities and emotional development.

Third, some of the regular picture books are beautifully illustrated where this is rarely true for early reader books. Our daughter is very sensitive to beauty and I want to foster that particularly for her. But I think that even if she weren't, there's a missed opportunity for keeping our kids engaged in multiple dimensions of beauty if we rush her to picture-less books. She'll be there soon enough and for decades to come. 

Anyways, that's our current approach. With such limited data and experience, I don't want to prescribe this for every family, but I'd love to see more families graduate their new readers of any age from the controlled "early reader" books BACK to regular picture books rather than making a beeline for picture-less chapter books. 

 

Early Reader Books, Part 1

As a Zoobean curator and mom, I'm always on the prowl for a good kids book. For me, I'm looking for good art and an interesting re-readable story. And then our oldest started learning to read.

Early reader books were nothing like the "good" kids books I had been looking for. This is a very different, transitional stage for the child who benefits from a restricted set of vocabulary. The art tends to be ok to bad and the stories are seldom worth reading more than once. That said, here are resources that were helpful to us in the early stages. It's not exhaustive, it's what we liked most from what was available to us via the library and recommendations from other moms. If you've come across some resources that have been helpful, please leave a comment!

1) Bob books

We got these used from another family, and it kicked things off for our oldest. I see them often at Costco. The vocabularly is well controlled in each book providing focus and practice on particular sounds.

2) Starfall.com 

Another resource we learned about from others. Our oldest really liked the site and picked up the lessons quickly. It's got a 90s website vibe to it, but most of the site is free. So free and engaging, can't really beat that.

3) Mo Willems

Of Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus fame, Mo Willems's early readers from Cat the Cat to Gerald and Piggie have a remarkable ability to convey a lot with a very small, repetitive vocabulary. Gerald and Piggie, in particular, get caught up in antics that are quite entertaining and have a relationship reminiscent of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street.

4) Dr. Suess

It's easy to forget that these well-loved classics are also early reader books. They also do a lot with a small, repetitive vocabulary while adding elements of rhythm and rhyme which provides a lot of practice for the early reader but they are usually much longer than Mo Willems' books. Requires some stamina to make it all the way through.

5) Jon Scieszka's Trucktown

Zany characters with fun illustrations, these tend to be very early reader books and have been fun for both our reader and younger not-yet-a-reader. Granted, our not-yet-a-reader is a bit truck obsessed.

6) Olivia (Ready-to-Read Series)

It turns out that Olivia is a Nickelodeon character in a television show of the same name. I didn't know this when we came across her. These early readers have nice illustrations and more interesting stories than most.

In my spare time...

The last six months or so, I've been curating children's books for Zoobean.com which will be open to the public in mid-May. Here's a blog post I wrote for them on some of our favorite illustrators:

Sometime during the seven years I trained as a linguist I went from a world-traipsing museum-goer to a life of words, words, and more words. Oh, and the occasional gesture and eye-gaze.

In my new life with little ones, I've been reintroduced to visual art and have encountered some wonderful artists disguised as children's book illustrators.

Here are a few artists that have stood out over the past 600-odd books we've looked through.

1) Zachary Pullen
We first encountered Pullen in The Toughest Cowboy: or How the Wild West Was Tamed. This was a fun book, but Pullen's art was better than John Frank's story. So I hunted for other work by Pullen and found Friday My Radio Flyer Flew which he authored and illustrated. Home run! (Speaking of which, he's also illustrated Lipman Pike: America's First Home Run King.)

Pullen paints wonderfully detailed caricatures from frequently odd, close-up angles that invites the reader. young and old, to enter into the world of the book.

2) Jane Dyer
We first noticed Dyer in Talking Like the Rain: A Read-to-Me Book of Poems. Her watercolors paired so well with the thematically arranged poems.

Then, browsing in the non-fiction section of the library we came across Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Cookies: Bite-Size Life Lessons. Rosenthal uses cookies to define abstract terms like modest, fair, and content. Dyer's watercolors of children and animals complement Rosenthal's text in a way that provided a context and opportunity for me to discuss important concepts with our four-year-old. Because she's starting to become aware of ethnic and linguistic differences and her own ethnic heritages, I also appreciated that the children depicted were from a number of different ethnic backgrounds.

3) John Himmelman
Himmelman's extensive experience observing and documenting the natural world is obvious in his renderings of animals. As my father-in-law commented about Chickens to the Rescue, Himmelman has perfectly captured "chicken-ness" on every page. The antics of the thirty-odd chickens are so engaging even my two-year-old frequently dumps the book into my lap for another go at them. We've read several of Himmelman's other children's books, but this is our hands-down favorite. This summer, I plan to take a look at his non-fiction "Nature Upclose" series.

In my late teens and early twenties, I chased down the abstract paintings of Kandinsky and Malevich, and as much as I enjoyed that, it was sort of a personal quirk and definitely a solitary pursuit. In these children's books, I've been able to share the experience of beauty and truth with two little people I love. It's fun to have them point out what they notice, eg. my two-year-old always points out the upside down chicken in Chickens to the Rescue, and for them to remember things we talked about the last time we read the book. One day I'll introduce my kids to Kandinsky and Malevich, but for now we're having a whale of a time with Pullen, Dyer, and Himmelman.