ABSTRACT
The best picturebooks are highly sophisticated works of art which combine the visual and the verbal in interesting and ingenious ways. ‘Picturebook’ describes books with many different styles and formats. Some picturebooks are wordless, some have minimal text and then there are the graphic and comic book stories that need to be gathered into the fold. Picturebooks are an excellent introduction to the world of literature for young children and, at the same time, are a first step into literacy. Older children sometimes return to the picturebooks they read when they were younger to re-savour the stories and to bring a more sophisticated eye to them. Wordless picturebooks have an important role in the development of literacy, especially visual literacy. Quite a lot of picturebooks for the very youngest children reflect this age group’s need for the repetition that they find in songs and action rhymes.
