Page 64 - Reading Nest - The Supportive Literacy Environment Handbook

Illustrated books with hardly any text also deserve attention, such as “Little Bird” by

Germano Zullo and Albertine, which tells a story through brightly colourful images.
Excellent picture books can even have fairly laconic use of colour, for example “Olivia” by

Ian Falconer mostly uses black and red. There is also a type of book called silent book, stories

without words. Pictures alone depict the story: events, characters, relationships, details. Such
books become particularly important in multicultural education. Linguistic obstacles are

removed, everybody may equally understand the book.

The role of illustrations has been growing in importance in the so-called storybook as well.

School stories, adventure stories, literary fairy tales – all of them have pages, or even double
pages of illustrations. Often these are black-and-white drawings with various functions. There

are drawings and design features which bring the book’s and the children’s texts together,
such as school stories, these are like handwritten texts on lined notepaper with small drawn

details inside the text (e.g. The Brilliant World of Tom Gates by Liz Pichon). The drawings

may show content elements such as a school timetable or weekly plan in Chris Riddell’s
Ottoline series, or intense spellbinding episodes as in “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by

Brian Selznick. Interpretation of events in such a book requires specific skills and is not a
mere traditional retelling of a story.

In the times where every well-known plot has been rendered in a multitude of ways, the book

selection in the reading nest should also reflect the teacher's attitudes towards world and

national literature. Fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers or Astrid
Lindgren‘s books bridge and connect children’s, parents’ and grandparents’ reading

materials.