Link to Theresa Walsh Giarrusso's October 8 "Momania" blogpost in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Let your kids look at picture books! Stop pushing chapter books so early!"
Excerpt: This trend really aggravates me because there are stages to learning to read and write and one of the stages is looking at the pictures and children interpreting them for themselves!
Kids love to study the drawings for details. They like to figure out what is going on. Observe the action. Create their own story about what they are seeing.
Pictures help them figure out order of action. They help develop a narrative. They help them learn to include details in their own stories.
Some of our favorite books have little to no words.
Tomie dePaola’s “Pancakes for Breakfast” is a family favorite about an old woman who has to gather the milk, eggs and churn butter just to make her pancakes. The kids love telling the story of what all the woman has to do and how she is feeling and how her pets feel when they eat all her batter.
“Eloise Takes a Bawth” is another book the kids will still study for hours. They follow the trails of water leaking through the Plaza hotels floors from Eloise’s tub. They study Eloise’s toys in the bathtub. They thoroughly examine all the guests’ costumes at the big Venetian ball at the end of the story.
Related article:
Picture books increasingly bypassed for chapter books. (10/8/2010)
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