Picture Books!

Undertaking my current Primary Education degree has contributed to my steadily growing collection of picture books. The past few years of English Education have taught me how invaluable picture books are for a number of reasons. I’ve always loved reading, but I have a new appreciation for picture books because they are appropriate for all ages and portray some very real issues in society. Sometimes I can’t resist walking into a book shop and picking out a new picture book to take home! I would like to share with you some of the picture books I own. Perhaps you could share some of your favourites too

Graeme Base is my favourite author and illustrator. His books have the most incredible attention to detail and each one contains a puzzle; so every time you open one of Base’s books, something new is to be found! Stories such as The Waterhole and Uno’s Garden have important messages in them, encouraging readers’ to think about how the world’s precious resources can be saved. Base uses warthogs in place of people in Jungle Drums, where the story is all about appreciating what you have.

I have previously used The Waterhole for a reader’s theatre drama lesson in Stage One. The class was split into groups and students took on the role of one of the animals. We used a blue towel as our ‘waterhole’ and the class had lots of fun performing! Click here for a copy of the lesson plan.

There are a variety of resources available online for many of Base’s books, such as the Graeme Base Teacher Resource File. Click here to visit this site.

Jon Scieszka is another great author, and one book in particular proves to be a hit in all classrooms, no matter what grade – The Stinky Cheese Man. I have taken this book with me for numerous casual days, and whenever I’ve read one of the many fractured fairytales within it, students are ALWAYS asking for more! Have a look at the blurb (in the picture above) – this is a fantastic post-modern picture book. I highly recommend it to everyone!

 He has also written Math Curse, which is narrated by the character on the left and starts off like this… “ON MONDAY in math class, Mrs. Fibonacci says, “YOU KNOW, you can think of almost everything as a math problem.” On Tuesday I start having problems,” (Sieszka & Smith, 1995, First double page spread). The book continues to analyse daily life as a maths problem, and provides an interesting spin on maths!

Kids love this book as well, and it’s great because together they can work on the maths problems within it.

Older students could even come up with their own Maths Curse book, perhaps as a class, working in pairs.

Scieszka, along with illustrator Lane Smith, has also written Science Verse which is similar to Math Curse, only looking at “the poetry of science in everything,” (Scieszka, 2007).

This link will take you straight to Scieszka’s website for a list (and description!) of all his books.