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Sidewalk Flowers by Lawson and Smith
Sidewalk Flowers is a wordless Canadian picture book by poet JonArno Lawson and illustrated by Sydney Smith.
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Wolf in the Snow by Matthew Cordell Analysis
Wolf in the Snow (2017) is an almost wordless picture book written and illustrated by Matthew Cordell, with links to the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. All picturebooks are puzzles. The details of pictures invite attention to their implications. The unmoving pictures require viewers to solve the puzzle of what actions and motions they […]
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Up and Up by Shirley Hughes Analysis
This month I wrote a post on Teaching Kids How To Structure A Story. Today I continue with a selection of mentor texts to help kids see how it works. Let’s look closely at another wordless picture book, this time by Shirley Hughes: Up and Up, from 1979. STORY STRUCTURE OF UP AND UP Up and Up […]
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The Farmer and the Clown by Marla Frazee Analysis
This month I’m blogging a series aimed at teaching kids how to structure a story. This seven-step structure works for all forms of narrative. It works for picture books, songs, commercials, films and novels. Today I take a close look at The Farmer and the Clown by Marla Frazee to show how universal structure exists […]
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Leaf by Stephen Michael King Picture Book Analysis
Leaf by Australian storyteller Stephen Michael King is a wordless book comprising pictures and onomatopoeia. How does one write flap copy for a (largely) wordless picture book? The publishers of leaf have obviously done a test read with a young reader called Amelia and they quoted her response for the flap. This story reminds me […]
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More! by Peter Schossow Picture Book Analysis
Peter Schossow’s picture book More! is wordless in the same way Robert Redford’s All Is Lost is wordless: Both contain one spoken word, imbued with huge weight accordingly. Gecko Press brought this book from German to English in 2010, and have also translated another of Schossow’s works: My First Car Was Red. Even a ‘wordless’ picture […]
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The Snowman by Raymond Briggs
This month I’m blogging a series aimed at teaching kids how to structure a story. This seven-step structure works for all forms of narrative. It works for picture books, songs, commercials, films and novels. Today I take a close look at The Snowman by Raymond Briggs.
