Are We Underestimating The Power Of Picture Books In Our Haste To Create Readers Who Pass Tests?
"Picture books are not in any way superficial"
- by Debra Kidd
Imagine the scene. The room is silent. My class are pouring over a book, annotating feverishly as they go.
“The chips in the teapot suggest that the family are poor and struggling to make ends meet.”
“Even the way they hang up their coats shows how close they are – how terrible it would be if they were separated.”
They are looking at the opening images of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival and are captivated. Over the course of the half term, they explore the issue of immigration, covering concepts of plurality, tolerance and migration. They write stories, diary entries, job applications, tour guides, imaginary laws; all stimulated by this richest of books – a book with no words at all.
“I think this might be the hardest book I’ve ever read,” quips one.
We underestimate the importance of picture books in our haste to create readers. But readers are more than decoders. They are archaeologists, painstakingly digging for meaning, intention, purpose. A great picture book allows these skills to develop at a very early age.
Colin McNaughton’s Suddenly had my three-year-old belly laughing in that way that only three-year-olds can – the juxtaposition of the anti-climactic words, positioned next to the dramatic images of the foolhardy wolf, delighted him. But they also taught him the value of looking closely; the idea that things are not always what they seem. All great picture books do this.
Anyone who has taught Anthony Browne’s masterpiece Zoo will know that important literary notions of dramatic irony and subtext are interwoven in the interaction between image and text. Without the pictures, the polar bear is stupid, the father less threatening, the animals boring, rather than bored.
Reading those images allows children to develop the vital skills of analysis that will be crucial not only to their future development as students of literature, but also of art, and of source material in other subjects. It will equip them with the skills to look beyond the surface of images in the news – to seek truth, verification, interest and deeper meaning. Picture books are not in any way superficial and are not limited to EYFS and KS1 – in my opinion, we should continue to use high quality picture books throughout the whole of school and as a segue into media studies and art.
We are only just beginning to better understand the importance of image in supporting memory. When new information is spread across a number of areas, memory is greatly enhanced and cognitive overload reduced. Presenting images alongside text makes for better retention, aiding comprehension. But more than this, visual centres in the brain are a key element of creativity.
According to neuroscientist Anna Abraham, during a creative process the brain will pull down information from across a range of areas – visual, linguistic, spacial, limbic (emotional), and find ways of connecting stimuli in those areas in new ways. Ensuring that children are offered a rich sensory diet in school allows them to draw across these sensory experiences when faced with a problem or a need to innovate.
The creative mind will switch between the generative and analytical, the emotional and rational, the visual, spacial and linguistic, to push new ideas forward. Offering children the opportunity to interact with rich texts that activate as many parts of the brain as possible can only be seen as a good thing: it is food.
Pushing children too quickly away from images to word based texts undermines their capacity to learn that pictures can be as complex as language can. It cuts them off from a rich source of information. Books incorporating beautiful illustration with text are the richest kind of all, and a child who has been steeped in these will draw on those visual centres to imagine images into being when they encounter ‘word only’ texts. They will develop an emotional link to the text, by seeing and feeling the images it generates in their minds – the ‘inward eye’ of Wordsworth’s blissful solitude. Let’s not then, in our rush to make the kinds of readers who pass tests, undermine the development of a lifelong love of reading by devaluing the very texts that build the skills that a great reader has. Let’s champion the picture book.
Debra Kidd has worked in education for over 20 years and has delivered CPD nationally and internationally. Find her at debrakidd.wordpress.com and follow her on Twitter at @debrakidd.
