Do Children’s Books Need Pictures? Quote of the Day

Many people assume that books for young children need – or at least benefit from – pictures. But is it true? Canadian scholar Perry Nodelman writes that many parents and teachers think that children respond more readily to pictures than to words:

“Yet there is no irrefutable psychological or pedagogical reason that young children should be told the vast majority of their [stories] through combinations of words and pictures. Indeed, there is evidence that the presence of pictures in books may be pedagogically counterproductive; in a study of young children beginning to learn to read, the psychologist S. Jay Samuels confirmed his hypothesis ‘that when pictures and words are presented together, the pictures would function as distracting stimuli and interfere with the acquisition of reading responses’… and presumably, therefore, of the story information that texts convey. Given the opportunity, as were most children prior to the last century and as some modern children in developing countries still are, many young children find it possible to enjoy listening to or reading books without illustrations.”

Perry Nodelman in Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books (University of Georgia Press, 1988). Words About Pictures is an excellent reference book for critics, scholars and others and perhaps the best available study of the relationship between words and pictures in children’s picture books.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Five Things I Learned About Sara Gruen’s ‘Water for Elephants’ From the First Two Chapters

Yesterday I read the first two chapters of Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants www.algonquin.com, a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Here’s what I learned about the novel from them:

1. The narrator is a man in his 90s. He sometimes thinks that if he had “to choose between an ear of corn or making love to a woman,” he’d choose the corn.

2. The characters say things like “Dagnammit” and “Grady, git that jug back, will ya?”

3. Some characters “hiss,” “cackle,” “bark,” “hoot” and “cluck” their words instead of saying them. (As in: “‘Woohoo,’ cackles the old man,” page 26.)

4. These clichés appear in the first page-and-a-half: “thunderous applause,” “screeched to a halt,” “My heart skipped a beat,” “No one moved a muscle,” and “ ‘you’ve got a lot to lose.’”

5. Susan Cheever says this is a book about “what animals can teach people about love” (quote in the front matter).

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.