Picture Books

As an integral part of children’s literature, history, and culture, picture books offer inventive, exciting, and diverse ways of looking at the worlds of children and childhood. Often aimed at and designed for young children, the picture book is usually the first book one encounters as a preliterate reader. That accessibility, however, by no means equates the picture book to being ‘simple’ or ‘easy’. In fact, understanding picture books requires the development of particular skill sets that involve acts of decoding and interpreting, the use of memory and reasoning, and certain types of vocabulary or grammar (including both visual and verbal). The complexity of the picture book itself presents within its very definition, which can be described as narrative (with or without the actual use ...