Books with no words are intimidating. I remember picking one up and thinking: What do I do with this? When I was visiting my daughter’s preschool, one of the moms was supposed to be reading the book she purchased the school in honor of her son’s birthday, but it didn’t have words so she didn’t know how to read it to the group of four-year-olds. However, we’ve found books without words to be a gift of love and literacy to our family. We’ve listened to our girls try out new words, add transitions to their stories, and giggle at plot twists that daddy adds. This is how the Hendersons maximize the potential of books with no words…
- Set Ground Rules: Our ground rules are that each person gets a two-page spread. One person is the story teller for those two pages. You can’t tell someone else what they should say when it’s her turn. You can’t complain about someone else’s part of the story. (We slip up a lot, but we know this is the standard.)
- Model good storytelling: The kids listen and pay close attention to everything we say. We try to include transition words, use suspense, add humor, and always have descriptive details. The girls almost always model one of those techniques on their next page.
- Interact with the book: We ask the girls about their choices in the story. When a character gets excited, we stop for a dance party break. If a character is scared, we stop to show what we would look like in that situation.
- Switch it up: The difference (and joy) of wordless books is that the story can be different every time. It can be a little bit different or it can be completely different. Sometimes our girls want the characters to have the same names; sometimes they want to give them new names. The awesome thing about it is that they own the story, so it can be whatever they want.
Our girls love Journey by Aaron Becker. I hope to introduce them to Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson soon to see if they notice any similarities. What wordless books do you enjoy?
Love and Literacy 