[This is part four in a series on our favorite children’s stories and is being cross-posted on my new parenting blog.  Please visit the first post for instructions!]

One aspect of children’s picture books is that they aren’t simply words, but picture books.  An intrinsic part of the storytelling is done through pictures, images, paintings, or illustrations.  More than one comment I’ve heard about children’s books is that the pictures are incredibly important.  My own experience tells me that as I remember Frederick from my childhood, but I never actually remembered the story.

A friend of ours is a language specialist. She points out the importance of pictures in language acquisition. The child hears the words of the story as a parent reads to her and examines the images.  The child then learns by going back through the book, using those images as cues to the story.  Therefore the pictures are essential.

Those that know me well know that I grew up as a huge comic book fan, so I might be a bit biased, but the advent of the “modern” comic book, thanks to the pioneering illustrator Jack Kirby, saw an important development in the relationship between the pictures to the text.  His style was not only dynamic, but it expressed more than what was simply written in the text.  He elevated the visual element of the medium to coequal status with the linguistic element.  Picking up any comic book today and you will see how essential the visual element is to the method of storytelling; and the visuals themselves are an incredible communicator.

My fourth choice for this series of Favorite Children’s Stories is a picture book by one of my favorites, David Wiesner.  It is called Tuesday.

Tuesday is a highly visual book, telling a magical story of what happens at dusk on some random Tuesday.  Known to my daughter as “The Frogs” book, we follow the events that take place one Tuesday.  We point out the small details and how they connect later in the story.  We imagine what these different characters might say, including the animals.  We wonder what they might be doing or thinking.  And in the end, we talk about next time.

Even if you don’t have kids, you should look for Wiesner’s books.  They are all incredible pieces of storytelling, so fully integrated visually and linguistically.  They also speak to the imagination of a child and all that could possibly be.

Related articles

• Favorite Children’s Stories (novacation.wordpress.com)
• Book Review: Art and Max (valleyoakfamily.com)