The Importance of Exposing Young Children to Wordless Picture Books

These days it seems that teachers and parents are devoting an ever-increasing amount of time and energy to supporting the decoding efforts of very young children. In the varied preschool and kindergarten settings I observed over this past year, automatic letter recognition, noticing the distinct sounds in words, mapping sounds onto letters, and blending sounds to make new words were common instructional focuses. On the one hand, this is encouraging news—a mountain of research suggests that these skills are prerequisites to the development of fluent reading. And, they haven’t always been targeted in early childhood settings.

On the other hand, whenever we increase the amount of time and energy spent on one component of learning to read, we risk decreasing the amount of time spent on equally important components. In his book, The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads, cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham warns us of this phenomenon:

“When we consider reading education, we can’t think about aspects of reading in isolation. Doing so entails the risk that we’ll change instruction to improve one aspect of reading and unwittingly worsen another aspect” (Willingham, 2017, p.10).

Comprehension is one key aspect of reading threatened by an overemphasis of phonological awareness (noticing and manipulating the sounds in words), alphabet knowledge, and phonics (mapping sounds onto letters)—motivation is another one, but I’ll save my thoughts on that one for another post! We simply cannot afford to neglect comprehension building in the early years. Our ability to derive meaning from all forms of expression is crucial to our long-term success, and the early childhood years lay the foundation for deep meaning-making.

Engaging children in making sense of story illustrations is one viable activity teachers and parents can use to support the development of young children’s comprehension abilities (Schickedanz & Collins, 2012). Wordless picture books, specifically, invite children to carefully consider illustrations and integrate their observations into a cohesive narrative. Many of the strategies children employ to make sense of wordless picture books (e.g. searching for information, rereading, cross-checking, and self-correcting) are the same strategies they will need to make sense of print (Lysaker & Hopper, 2015).

Young children who are not yet reading often jump at the opportunity to “read” the story they create from a wordless book to others. Children who are beginning to read might be taken aback by this experience at first—all the more reason to encourage them to regularly engage with wordless picture books. My five-year-old daughter, Gabi, created the following (rank-ordered) list of wordless picture books she believes every kid should “read”:

1.      Fossil by Bill Thomson

2.      Chalk by Bill Thomson

3.      Flashlight by Lizi Boyd

4.       Flotsam by David Wiesner

5.      A Ball for Daisy by Chris Raschka

I echo her enthusiasm for these titles, but maintain that there are numerous others equally worthy of devouring. Reading Rockets offers another (lengthier) list of classics. Gabi also recommends that kids “read these books with their friends.”

Young children seem to love to build stories from wordless picture books together. Another benefit of turning a wordless picture book reading into a group meaning-making exercise is that it allows you to scaffold children’s understandings as needed.  The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS; Yenawine, 2018) method recommends the following open-ended questions for getting children talking about art:

1.      What’s going on in this picture?

2.      What do you see?

3.      What do you notice?

Yenawine (2018) advises early childhood educators to “listen carefully to what children mention, point to each observation, and respond to students by paraphrasing each child’s thoughts” (p.17). Regardless of how you get them going, children’s regular and careful analyses of story illustrations are likely to serve them well in the short- and long-term.