My epiphany about picture books that make electric read-alouds
...and the unit that inspired it (with 9 book recs)
Happy weekend, readers!
I tried something new with my second and third-grade students as our final unit of the school year: books with a secret theme.
Kid comments during this unit affirmed my belief that kid readers are brilliant consumers of great art, and watching their faces during our read-alouds led me to an epiphany about a specific recipe of picture book craft techniques that deliver an electric read-aloud experience.
The Unit
I told my readers, “This month, our books have a theme, but I’m keeping it secret. As we read, it’s your job to see if you can figure out what it is.”
After the story each week, I paused to record student guesses of what our “secret theme” might be. In the welcome message in subsequent weeks (our routine before reading), I recapped student guesses and asked students to see if this week’s book matches, or if they have a new guess.
Their guesses, of course, were all valid observations of themes and connections between stories, but framing it as a secret guessing game rather than a snooze-worthy discussion of theme surged student engagement.
My secret theme? Books where a character gets eaten.
Student guesses included animal stories, books where someone gets eaten, mysteries, and surprise stories. My favorite student guess was “reader’s choice stories” — a particularly astute articulation of how stories give the reader agency and decision-making power over what’s happening in the story. Kids… Brilliant!
The Books
Because I know you’re going to ask (I would!), the books we read were:
A Very Hungry Lion, or a Dwindling Assortment of Animals by Lucy Ruth Cummins
A Well-Mannered Young Wolf by Jean Leroy, illustrated by Matthieu Maudet
Bear Despair by Gaetan Doremus
Other books that would be right at home in this unit, but I didn’t include because I’ve already read them aloud this year:
The Epiphany
My experience reading aloud to kids over 1,000 times a year has led me to the conclusion that books that give kids a high degree of agency make for the very best group read-aloud experiences, and the reader agency in this unit went to eleven.
One key technique book creators employ to deliver this agency is visual inference: when something is happening in the art that isn’t in the words, and the kid reader gets to be the one to figure it out — the picture book’s capacity to literally “show, don’t tell.” Any time a story we’re reading does this, I hear chatter between kids spike (a good indicator of kid engagement in the story).
Another powerful technique for delivering agency is omission. (My brain was rewired listening to Jon Klassen discuss the art of omission and “the Far Side fast forward” in this podcast episode and this one.) Let me tell you — these are the moments that earn gasps, exclamations, and outrage (in the best way). Since becoming aware of the power of using a page turn to skip past an event to its visual aftermath, I love to look up at the precise instant I know one of these moments will hit and watch as the jaws around the room fall open, a librarian’s version of the wave.
These techniques aren’t new, though, so what’s the big epiphany?
It’s the sequence, baby.
Here’s my working theory: books that deliver the one-two punch of repeated visual inference, then omission as knockout, make for electric, unforgettable read-alouds.
Lucy Ruth Cummins’s A Very Hungry Lion does this to great effect:
An animal disappears from the page — jab.
Another animal — jab.
The lights go dark — jab.
The lights go on, and oh shit no one’s been eaten it’s actually a surprise party — bob and weave.
The T-rex shows up — jab.
That last spread — KNOCKOUT!!!
(Key: jab = visual inference, bob and weave = visual inference in a way that breaks the established pattern of the text, knockout = omission). Cummins invites the kid reading to make inference after inference — the inferences growing in size as the story unwinds — then, in a final page turn, leaves a gap so big the reader gets to make one heck of a creative decision.
Books that repeatedly deploy visual inference build a kind of trust between author/illustrator and reader: you have a job to do here, reader, and it’s important. Then, once that trust is established and an author completely obliterates it, lightning.
The Third Creator
I’m all for authors and illustrators, but my secret favorite is the third creator: the child reading.
Their inferences and theories.
Their interjections and outrage.
That strange detail? Beguiled.
Predictability? Be damned!
When it comes to picture books, the very best stories are the ones that empower the child to act as the third creator. The author bows to the mind of the child, actively ceding to their power in the act of storytelling. Whether through visual inference or omission or something else entirely, the child is anointed as co-conspirator, with real, meaningful decisions to make about the page.
That event the child imagines between page turns? It’s a necessary, visceral part of the story. Without the child’s creative work of imagining, the event wouldn’t exist. Not really.
The author who respects this is doing powerful work, indeed.
A picture book without inference is a flaccid thing. It can be fine — lovely, even. But electric? Never.
What do you think? What other books employ this formula of repeated visual inference followed by a leap of omission? Any other favorite books where someone gets eaten?
This summer, I’ll be writing a new series for paid subscribers called “Anatomy of a Read Aloud,” where I take a page-by-page look at one book and its effect on kid readers. I’ll be kicking things off with a close read of A Very Hungry Lion. Join us!
Happy reading,
Chrissie