by Roger Sutton
A Family of Readers is not meant to be a buying guide; we know readers too well for that. We hope that spending time with us — listening to us, learning from us, even disagreeing with us — will help sharpen your own sense of what makes books work with young people. As we are readers, we respect readers, and it is in that spirit of companionship and conversation that we present you what we have learned in decades of reading, reviewing, sharing books, and paying attention to the reactions of child readers.
Why do kids read? They read because they are made to, of course, but they also read — via media in a multitude of forms — because they want to find something out, or they want to join their imagination with somebody else’s. I will say it again: They read for the same reasons adults do.
“Reading to Them” is a useful rubric, but not one to be taken literally. The reading that happens with a child on your lap — or cuddled with you in a chair, or through the slats of a crib, or around a low table in the toddlers’ section of a library — is rarely linear. It is a complex give-and-take that falls somewhere along the interactive spectrum, depending on the specific book being read, the age of the child, the relationship of the adult and child, even the time of day. But in general, reading with small children is more sharing than telling, and more activity than lesson.
With a one-year-old baby, you may be the one reading the book aloud, but the baby will probably want to turn the pages herself. With an enthusiastic toddler, reading can be a joyfully communal activity, resulting in an experience that is at once aural (listening as the adult reads), visual (looking at the pictures), vocal (identifying objects, imitating animal sounds, joining in on a text’s familiar refrain, asking questions about or commenting on story or art), and kinetic (pointing at pictured objects, mimicking a character, acting out a Mother Goose rhyme). Preschoolers may memorize chunks of text — or whole books — and may want to do the “reading” themselves, with adults or siblings or stuffed animals as audience. (There are many excellent titles that manage to be both satisfying picture book experience and reading primer: from classics such as Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and How Do I Put It On? to newer titles such as Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s Dog and Bear and Emily Gravett’s Orange Pear Apple Bear, to name just a few.)
I think of picture books as stores of transferable potential energy. Rarely, if ever, is the child a total nonparticipant in the “reading to them” equation. A seemingly passive listener may be quietly absorbing story and pictures, storing up enough experience with the book until he is eventually ready to interact more fully. As a three-year-old, my younger daughter was delayed in her speech development and preferred balls and playgrounds to books. I persisted in reading to her, though — lots of Mother Goose, Peggy Rathmann, Byron Barton, Eve Rice, Nancy Tafuri, Lucy Cousins, and Donald Crews. A particular favorite, read night after night, was William Steig’s Doctor De Soto, in which a mouse dentist and his clever wife outwit a scheming fox. Ellie, basically language-less, never joined in the reading as did her very verbal older sister, but seemed to listen and enjoy. Then late one evening after a very long day, returning from a family vacation, we sat in a crowded DC-10 surrounded by a horde of unrepentantly rowdy high-school hockey players. Ellie sank lower and lower in her seat, trying to get as far away from them as possible. Suddenly she stood up and yelled as loudly as she could, “No one will see you again, said the fox to himself” — verbatim, from Doctor De Soto. This rather surreal (to the hockey players) statement earned her a few seconds of blessed (and stunned) silence. For me, it reinforced my belief in “reading to them.” What pours out of a picture book through repeated readings by an adult reader will eventually be reinvested by the child listener.
There’s a simple, benignly empowering part most children can play in the picture-book transaction: turning the pages. If a child is allowed to turn the pages of a picture book himself, whether he is looking at it independently or listening to an adult read, he is in control of the experience. He can choose when to speed up and when to slow down; when to linger on a particularly absorbing spread and when to rush excitedly on to find out what happens on the next page or, conversely, to skip the boring bits. A child turning the pages of a picture book not only learns to exercise power on an age-appropriate scale but also learns about story and pacing and begins to define his own literary and visual likes and dislikes.
Reading to children does not necessarily require traditional picture books. A baby’s diet of board books can be supplemented by homemade scrapbooks or family photo albums, or engagingly photographed clothing or toy catalogs, or colorful nature magazines. A five-year-old might want to be read beginning readers and early chapter books as well as picture books. But the reverse is true as well. One needn’t ever grow out of picture books — especially now, when more and more picture books are aimed at older elementary-age children. And in this image-ascendant age, visual literacy is arguably becoming at least as important as verbal literacy. The skill of navigating through picture books will translate directly to navigating through, say, graphic novels. In fact, picture books give young readers a basic structural sense of how to tell a story in words and images, and that narrative DNA is all the more important when they leave the thirty-two–page structure. One can think of the picture book as finger exercises on the piano — you return to them even after you’ve moved on to more complex forms. In any case, it would be a shame to confuse format of book with quality of experience or to deprive a child of the treasures of the picture-book world.
In the ever-shifting continuum of “reading to them” — an evolving range of books, situations, and participants — there remains the ideal of the parent, the child, and the picture book. So much contributes to the unique success of this ideal interaction — even its physical shape. Consider a small child sitting on his mother’s lap while she reads him a picture book. The picture book opens to a width that effectively places the child at the center of a closed circle — that of mother’s body, arms, and picture book. Or perhaps the child is too big or too independent to sit on a parent’s lap — he sits next to her, one person holding the left side of the open picture book, the other the right side. Again, a circle. I don’t think it’s an accident that so much adult-child book-sharing forms and takes place within a circle, or that so many picture books open to a size that facilitates one. That circle, so private and intimate, is a place apart from the demands and stresses of daily life, a sanctuary in and from which the child can explore the many worlds offered in picture books. Despite all of our society’s technological advances, it still just takes one child, one book, and one reader to create this unique space, to work this everyday magic.
Once established, of course, the space grows elastic and expands as the child grows. It stretches to the length and shape of a parent in an armchair reading to a five-year-old in bed, an audiobook entertaining a family on a road trip, a teacher standing before a hushed, enthralled classroom.
But all that comes later. Let’s begin with books for the very young.
Babies don’t need complex stories, elaborate artwork, or high educational content. Books for babies can be as simple as Tana Hoban’s groundbreaking series of wordless black-and-white board books (Black on White; White on Black), with their high-contrast images of bibs, pacifiers, stuffed animals, and other homely objects associated with newborns. But though the books themselves may be simple, the interaction is anything but: with board books a baby is honing his visual and listening skills, bonding with the adult reader, and, yes, taking the first steps toward literacy. Every time an adult reads a book with a baby, she is passing on an essential building block of literacy: the page turn. The mechanics of reading — the fact that in order to read a book one has to turn its pages — is a basic skill, but it has to be learned. The page turn — the progression of left to right and front to back (at least in our Western culture) — is the foundation of reading. As an adult reader shares a book with a baby, she is transmitting that essential knowledge, the key
to later literacy.
Babies watch with remarkable intentness the components of their universe: faces, their own hands, a mobile. First board books should be a barely differentiated extension of that small universe. It’s not necessary to use books to expand a baby’s world — a reflection is more than sufficient.
Babies respond to books that promote interaction — animal sounds, vehicle noises, movements, opportunities to name objects or body parts. Pictures in books for babies are not only visual feasts for the baby but prompts for parental commentary. Any book a parent reads to a baby, even a wordless one, will be an opportunity for expressive language, be it a re-creation of animal sounds or the naming of objects or the creation of spontaneous stories to go with the pictures.
Board books are specifically made for babies: with their stiff, sturdy cardboard pages, nontoxic materials, and glossy wipability, they will survive teething, spills, spit-up, and worse — anything a baby can throw at them (sometimes literally). The most successful board-book creators tap into babies’ enthusiasms, attention spans, and (occasionally) senses of humor. Helen Oxenbury’s series of oversize board books, All Fall Down, Clap Hands, Say Goodnight, and Tickle, Tickle, features four diverse, active toddlers in an implied day-care setting singing, clapping, falling about, and waving — all with toddler-appropriate energy and warmth. Rosemary Wells’s Max books are about the power struggle between a willful baby rabbit and his bossy older sister, Ruby. In Max’s First Word, Ruby tries to persuade Max to name various innocuous household objects, but “Max’s one word was BANG!” Wells connects with her young audience because she is funny, able to shape plot and character with the briefest of texts, and always on Max’s side.
One distinction to be aware of is between board books conceived originally for the format and those that started life as full-size picture books. Board books are big business for publishers. Consumers love board books, for good reason: compared to picture books, they’re less expensive, more durable, and more portable — easier to tuck into a bag already bursting with snacks, extra clothes, toys, games, crayons, and puzzles. But beware: a board-book version of a picture book most probably reflects some compromises made necessary by the format change. While standard picture books have thirty-two pages, board books can have as few as twelve. So board books that are adapted from picture books must either conflate pages (taking the text and art from, say, two spreads of the original picture book and cramming it onto one page) or drop material altogether.
Ann Herbert Scott’s On Mother’s Lap is a classic picture book about sibling rivalry and familial love. It features a generous design based on double-page-spreads; a simple text; and a small, satisfying story. When Michael, a young Inuit boy, has the chance to snuggle with his mother in her rocking chair while his baby sister naps, he is anxious to include all his favorite things — his reindeer blanket, doll, toy boat, and puppy — in the experience. But when Baby wakes up, he balks at including her. “There isn’t room,” he says jealously. Mother persuades him to give it a try, and Michael finally admits that “it feels good.” The book ends with an iconic picture of family warmth and togetherness, with Michael’s mother telling him, “It’s a funny thing . . . but there is always room on Mother’s lap.”
The board-book version (at four by six inches) is too small to be a satisfying lap read; it excises two crucial setup illustrations and an entire double-page spread that depicts the conflict (so that, oddly, the board-book version has resolution but no conflict); and it’s not meant for babies. It is clearly older brother Michael who is the center of the story, Michael with whom readers are meant to identify. Despite the simplicity of text and layout, this story of a boy dealing with his feelings about a new baby is meant for older siblings, not babies.
A more successful translation from picture book to board book is Anne and Harlow Rockwell’s The Toolbox. Because the original picture book was aimed at very young children, the pictures (of a saw, a hammer and nails, pliers, and so on) are paramount, set against expanses of white space; the text is extremely brief, almost always one line per page; and the subject matter is of interest to many small children. The board-book version is a complete representation of the original, with no illustrations or transitions omitted, and it’s fully two-thirds the size of the original picture book.
The challenge, of course, is how to judge a brand-new board book gleaming up at you from its place on the bookstore shelf. After all, Goodnight Moon is just as good in board-book form — better, perhaps, since the board-book version is virtually indestructible. Peggy Rathmann’s subversively funny Good Night, Gorilla is also a perfect fit as a board book (and its glossier pages make it even easier to spot the runaway balloon on every spread). Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s delightful Each Peach, Pear, Plum, a must for the nursery, is 99 percent successful (the last page, with all the hidden fairy-tale characters, is perhaps a little cluttered in the smaller size). But as you’re standing in the bookstore, it won’t be immediately obvious to you which books work and which don’t. Publishers don’t advertise the fact that they’ve conflated pages or dropped pictures to make a board-book version of a picture book, and the original picture book is not always available to scrutinize for a page-by-page comparison — even if one had the leisure to do so. In any case, it’s not the paring down of pages per se that is so egregious: it’s the resultant loss of meaning and story shape. I pity the children (and parents) who know only the butchered versions of some of the best children’s picture books — such as unworthy recent board-book editions of Caps for Sale and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. They will never know what they’re missing.
My best advice is to read a board book as you would any picture book before purchasing it. In that way you can see for yourself whether it holds together as a story, whether it feels like a whole or seems truncated, and whether it’s aimed at babies and toddlers or is really better suited to older children.
Choosing original board books — those created specifically for the format — is easier, as long as you don’t let yourself get sucked into the latest publishing trend. As publishers have discovered that board books make great baby-shower gifts, for instance, we see bookstore shelves filled with titles like Urban Babies Wear Black — a hoot for hipster moms but unlikely to appeal to babies, whose interests do not yet extend to art galleries or yoga or, indeed, the concept of urban chic.
Board books seem to be more vulnerable to publishing trends than many other genres and therefore tend to go out of print quickly. (Lesson learned: if you find something your child loves, buy multiple copies!) One of my daughters’ favorite books when they were babies was Let’s Make a Noise by Amy MacDonald and Maureen Roffey. It was a perfect first board book: pure, simple interaction. “Let’s make a noise like a dog (train, cat, truck, sheep, baby)!” It was the enthusiastic and communal encouragement of making the noise that worked so well, as well as the clean, bright, cheerful pictures of the named objects and animals. (An added bonus: the noise the baby makes is “WAAAAH,” allowing lots of room for imitation and dramatic expression.)
Two new board books by photographer Margaret Miller are masterpieces of minimalism: each contains just six close-up photographs of babies’ faces, with one or two words on facing pages. I Love Colors shows a vocal baby wearing a red bow on her head, a serious baby in purple heart-shaped glasses, a happy baby with an orange flower tucked behind one ear, a shy baby peering through a plastic green ring — each photograph tightly focused and absolutely engrossing. What’s on My Head? is similarly captivating and also quite funny, as the items perching on the subjects’ heads — a rubber ducky? — are sometimes unexpected, but always familiar and baby-pleasing.
Baby Happy, Baby Sad by Leslie Patricelli homes in on recognizable baby emotions, tapping into babies’ basic realities. With its repeated, limited vocabulary and its humorous, expressive illustrations picturing “Baby HAPPY” (Baby holding a balloon or cavorting au naturel) and “Baby SAD” (Baby gazing up at the loosed balloon or swat
hed in a confining snowsuit), it is an excellent introduction to the concepts of happiness and sadness — as well as opposites.
Sandra Boynton’s must-have Blue Hat, Green Hat knows exactly what babies find funny, eliciting laughs even as it explores two concepts of interest (colors and clothes). While the other three animals model the various articles of clothing with deadpan aplomb, the hapless turkey is completely unschooled in how to wear a hat (he stands in it) or how to put on pants (he puts them on his head). The text, brief and straightforward, is infectiously interactive: “Blue hat, green hat, red hat, OOPS!” The word oops — short and punchy but with that croonable long ooooo — is amazingly fun to say (or shout) out loud, especially when all concerned know that it’s coming at the end of every spread and anticipate it. “Oops!” provides punctuation to the proceedings that will amuse babies and toddlers for reading after rereading. (Boynton’s Moo, Baa, La La La! — pure fun from the title on — is another crowd pleaser.)
