Children's column: Are you old enough for a picturebook?

Written by Nicolette Jones

Friday, 02 October 2009 01:00

As Children’s Book Week takes place next week, with its theme of Words and Pictures, I am full of hope. I had a hand in putting together Booktrust’s Children’s Book Week teachers’ pack that went out earlier in the year to all state primary schools (downloadable from the Booktrust website), and there were several messages that mattered to me to get across. One was the inestimable value – educational, social, emotional, developmental, and the sheer pleasure of the thing – of making every school a whole-book-reading, book-loving school. The others were related to this year’s special theme.

Another has been eloquently advocated by the Children’s Laureate: that you never get too old for pictures. I believe that more books for older children should be illustrated – not with computer-generated graphics, or feeble sketches, but with real, skilled, beautiful line drawings (cf Shirley Hughes’s illustrations to The Thirteen Days of Christmas). I think that picturebooks should be used in schools in GCSE and A-level art courses: as inspirations to budding illustrators, and as examples of ways to use fine art sources (Anthony Browne’s work provides plenty of instances, but so too does the work of Alexis Deacon, David McKee, Peter Malone and Raymond Briggs, to mention just a few obvious examples), as well as to stimulate all the same critical analysis and response we apply to works of fine art.

Picturebooks warrant attention in English classes too: it is not to demean your critical faculties to be able to analyse not only the text of a picturebook but also the narrative of the illustrations – and the interaction between the two. I can think of picturebooks that would be a wonderful springboard for discussion in Citizenship or RE classes: Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, Jeannie Baker’s Belonging, or Armin Greder’s The Island, for instance. And it is a waste not to use picturebooks in the teaching of foreign languages (with their clues to the meaning of the text); how much more satisfying they might be than the ubiquitous cartoons in language text books. And this is not to touch on the more widely acknowledged value of illustration in non-fiction: in reference, science and history books, where to see is often to understand.

There is already quite a general appreciation of the usefulness of pictures in encouraging reluctant older readers – Mr Gum, Horrible Histories, Captain Underpants, Marcia Williams’ comic strip tellings of the classics, The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, to name a few – but it would be nice if these were valued for more than this: because the images are interesting in themselves, however well you can read. The same is true of graphic novels: they belong to a filmic genre with its own distinguished history, and won’t rot your brain simply because they are visual.

While some picturebooks – Browne’s among them – obviously offer matter for older children, even those aimed at the very young are not beneath the attention of older readers (including adults). Art directors know what skill goes into the making of the picturebooks they produce, and the notion that, say, Quentin Blake’s draughtsmanship (acquired with a lifetime of practice and astonishing to watch in progress) is to be dismissed when you reach the age of five, is a kind of madness.

Let us hope that the Children’s Book Week pack, Anthony Browne’s Laureateship, and such initiatives as those stimulated by the Big Picture Campaign, will all tend towards a change of attitude and a celebration of the visual riches we need to make the next generation visually aware, and to make them understand the world. Children need pictures not just to make them artists, but to make them scientists, which also depends on observation, and to make them emotionally intelligent, as they read the feelings we grasp only from looking at each other. And if you ever hear a parent or teacher say to a child: “You are too old for picturebooks”, please slap their wrist for me.

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