Favorite Wordless Picture Books? - Page 2

[jake&zaxmom]

Bus 24 by Guy Billout

[Chamomile Girl]

Peggy Rathman's Ten Minutes Till Bedtime is really cool. It has a few words but they have very little to do with the immense amount of action in the pictures.

[Owen'nZoe]

Reviving an old thread with a new suggestion for anyone who is interested. I just found a book Mirror by Jeannine Baker. It follows a day in the life of two boys - one in Australia and one in Morocco. The stories are presented as mirror images of one another, so as you are paging through the Australian boy's story on the right side of the book, you are simultaneously paging through the Moroccan boy's story on the left side. http://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Jeannie-Baker/dp/0763648485/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294432218&sr=1-1-spell Really cool.

[laohaire]

I'd never experienced one of these books until yesterday - DH brought a book called "Chalk" home from the library for DD. Being left-brained, it took me a bit to catch on, but DD was captivated. I've seen her flip through it more than once since yesterday.

In this story, kids come to the playground and draw things with chalk they find, and the chalk magically makes the drawings come true. It's very imaginative, and it's easy to spend a fair amount of time thinking about or talking about what YOU would draw, and what would happen, etc.

Any suggestions for how to "read" these with your child? Do you say anything? Ask questions? Since it was my first time and I hadn't really thought about it before, and I'm left-brained, I narrated it a bit (though as usual I engaged DD with questions like "what's happening over here?" etc). At the end, I asked her what she would draw, etc. But I'm curious to know if there are better ways than what I did, whether it's good to narrate it at all or have your child narrate it or simply look at the pictures or.... ?

[Owen'nZoe]

It sounds like you did great! I don't think there is a right answer for how to read them - if you are both engaging with the book and enjoying it, that's what matters.

We've read about half of the books on this thread at this point, and how we approach them really depends on the book. In some cases, I ask DSs (aged 4 and 6) to read the book to me. They love this! They'll make up the story completely. Sometimes they each take a turn telling their version of the story. Usually the second one to go copies a lot from the first boy's story, but they always add some details of their own and tweak the story a bit. It is fun to listen to! This worked really well for The Tree House and the Mercer Mayer book. The boys received the Mouse and the Lion for Christmas, and they also read the story themselves, but in this case my older son already knew the Aesop fable, so his story stuck pretty close to the Aesop tale.

For some of the books, like Mirror and Black and White, I had to give more direction, because the storyline was more complex. I found myself narrating a lot for those two and asking them questions as we went along.

And for some books, the pictures are so awesome, we haven't really told a story per se, but have just talked about the pictures as we went along. That is how Flotsam worked for us.
 

Originally Posted by laohaire 

I'd never experienced one of these books until yesterday - DH brought a book called "Chalk" home from the library for DD. Being left-brained, it took me a bit to catch on, but DD was captivated. I've seen her flip through it more than once since yesterday.

In this story, kids come to the playground and draw things with chalk they find, and the chalk magically makes the drawings come true. It's very imaginative, and it's easy to spend a fair amount of time thinking about or talking about what YOU would draw, and what would happen, etc.

Any suggestions for how to "read" these with your child? Do you say anything? Ask questions? Since it was my first time and I hadn't really thought about it before, and I'm left-brained, I narrated it a bit (though as usual I engaged DD with questions like "what's happening over here?" etc). At the end, I asked her what she would draw, etc. But I'm curious to know if there are better ways than what I did, whether it's good to narrate it at all or have your child narrate it or simply look at the pictures or.... ?