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It's Elementary! Supporting Literacy in the Primary Grades
First grade teacher Miss Wynn is sharing Mo Willems's The Pigeon Wants A Puppy! (2008) with her class. During this interactive read-aloud she asks the children to share their thoughts about the book.
"Those lines mean he's wiggling his tail," Kali comments, pointing to an illustration of the puppy.
Stella notices that the words on one page are in dark, capital letters outlined in pink. "It means he's mad," she explains.
"What do those curvy lines mean?" Miss Wynn asks, building on the children's other observations about the illustrations and typeface in the book.
"It means he's bouncing around saying 'Puppy! Puppy! Puppy!"' Jamal says expressively, acting out the part of the pigeon.
"How does the pigeon feel in this picture?" the teacher asks, pointing to the pigeon, who in this illustration sits near the bottom of the page with his arms folded and his head facing down. The children chime in, "He's sad," and several of them read the pigeon's comment, "You just don't understand," in a sad voice.
At the end of the reading, Theo draws the teacher's attention to the front and back endpapers. "See, now he wants a walrus."
These first-graders are demonstrating their skills in understanding picture books. They know how to "read" the simple crayon drawings and hints suggested by the typeface to determine the pigeon's moods, and they use this information to read the text with the appropriate expression. They know to look at the endpapers-the illustrated pages at the front and back of the book-and the title page for more information about the story. In short, these first-graders are fluent in the language of picture books.
Telling stories through text and illustration
Commencing with the publication of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902, children's picture books became more than just stories decorated with pretty pictures; rather, they evolved into another genre of storytelling (Nodelman 1990) using two equally important sources of information: text and images. The terms picture book and picture storybook are used to refer to books in which text and illustrations both carry meaning. A number of theorists have described the interaction of text and pictures in picture books. Sipe used the term...