“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”
Astrid Lindgren, 1956
A good story can move the masses — stories can open up the world to a child. With meaningful pictures and concise words, picture books not only provide access to ones’ immediate reality and everyday things, but also to more difficult topics such as “feelings” or “cultural identity”.
By definition, the picture book is aimed at readers who are not yet able to read — the perfect medium for children between 2 and 8 years of age. Only in the course of their second year of life does a child’s ability to recognise and understand pictures develop. It is the familiar things from their immediate environment that the child recognises from illustrations and likes to look at.
Tell and listen
The child is dependent on the reader and needs a narrator who also listens when the child wants to show, ask or tell something. This stimulating linguistic and cognitive exchange is especially important at kindergarten age, because ideally the story in the book covers the range of interests and abilities of the listeners. Of course, the responsibility falls on the teacher, because he/she is the evaluating body and selects topics and media accordingly — an awareness of qualitative differences in the media, as well as the individual needs and interests of the children, is of great importance, because not every story needs telling.
Kindergarten Ennetbaden
Photo by Ben Mullins on Unsplash
