You are NOT the Poky Little Puppy: Talking about Picture Books with the Three-Year-Old

Ruth's post last week led to a lively discussion in the CLC about The Poky Little Puppy, a picture book that continues to live in our house despite the fact that the three-year-old finds it deeply disappointing (don't worry, I'll explain). And THAT led to a conversation about what types of talk you might engage with around picture books, especially because I am, I fully admit, a bulldozer of a reader when I read with my own children. I start the book, I read the words, I do the voices, and the three-year-old generally lets me be the talker the whole time.

However, as Ruth mentioned in her post, one of the benefits of read-alouds is the dialog that children engage in and the subsequent language development that ensues (Cochran-Smith, 1984).

That leads me to The Poky Little Puppy, which leads me to the image at the top of the page. What's wrong with this image, you say? Well, if you were the three-year-old, you would be extraordinarily miffed by the fact that, although the text is about the Poky Little Puppy, that picture is NOT of the Poky Little Puppy. That is one of the four, unnamed puppies who is so busy being roly-poly, pell-mell, tumble-bumble that it doesn't notice very important things like desserts being served at home.

THIS is the Poky Little Puppy, which the three-year-old explained to me because (and this is important) I. Didn't. Notice. The three-year-old clearly let me know that the Poky Little Puppy has darker ears and a clearly defined spot while the unnamed puppy's entire back is one long spot*. What I love about this conversation (which we now have to have every time we read the book... the three-year-old recognizes that it was a clever moment, and she's going to have that moment whenever she can) is that it's a great example of a close reading of the relationship between the text and images.

So, what are some other ways you (And I, because, as I mentioned above, stopping to talk about a book is not my forte) might encourage dialogue about a picture book?

•  Ask children what happened 'between' the pages. Sipe & Brightman (2009) observed that when asked what might have happened during the page turns, children fill in information and engage in thinking ranging from predictions to imaginary conversations between characters to character analysis.
• Look & describe. Pause together to look at the image for a bit. Then, describe what you see. Drawing on Perkin's The Intelligent Eye (1994), the Philadelphia Museum of Art uses these first two steps as a way of drawing youth into discussions of art in their resource Looking to Write, Writing to Look. Why start with description? By holding off on analysis, you notice new things differently. 
• Consider the shapes and colors. Is a tree roughly shaped like a triangle? Is the picture mostly red? In Picture This! How Pictures Work, Bang (1991/2016) explores the ways shapes and colors influence how we interpret books, and even small children interpret a book's pictures based on them.

Bang, M. (1991/2016). Picture this! How pictures work. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle.

Cochran-Smith, M. (1984). The making of a reader. Language and Learning for Human Service Professions Monograph Series (pp. 1–277). Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/63291434/

Perkins, D. (1994). The intelligent eye: Learning to think by looking at art. Los Angeles, CA: Getty.

Sipe, L. R., & Brightman, A. E. (2009). Young children’s interpretations of page breaks in Contemporary Picture Storybooks. Journal of Literacy Research, 41(1), 68–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/10862960802695214

*Clearly, the three-year-old is going to grow up to be one of those people who goes to comic-con and complains that, although the movie was set in Denmark, the soundtrack includes birds that only live in North America.