ABSTRACT
Picturebooks have become the subject of academic study and debate and so, for example, writers reflect on whether it is the pictures that are central or whether they work through a special interaction between the verbal and the visual. They cover every imaginable topic and theme: sad, dramatic, intriguing, puzzling, celebratory and joyful. Illustrators use an exciting range of media, too, ranging from traditional oil and watercolour, to crayon, pastel, pen and ink, collage, to digital techniques, often combined with other media. There are many novelty picturebooks using imaginative paper engineering to create pop-ups, pull-outs and cleverly cropped pages, holes and wheels, some of which simply entertain, while others enhance the story. Perhaps more than any other kind of reading material, their semantic subtlety and the ways in which they play with meanings indicate that linking a picturebook too closely to one age group would be unwise. So while I have some suggestions for choosing for different age groups, I hold to a light touch here. In the ‘Using’ section I suggest ways in which teachers can help children with this important, but sometimes challenging, kind of reading. Here I draw on an important research project which resulted in Arizpe and Styles’ book Children Reading Pictures: Interpreting Visual Texts. The importance of children’s talk around picturebooks, of making their observations, understandings and insights about visual texts explicit, shines out from this study.
