Reading Workshop

The renowned children’s author E. B. White once quipped, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but few people are interested and the thing dies in the process.” While we agree with his sentiment, we also suggest a brief exploration of the roles of humor in children’s picturebooks may be a worthy endeavor.             Children’s picturebooks and humor have had a close association since Randolph Caldecott enticed young children to read his picturebooks by poking fun at everyday events and illuminating the humorous aspects of the human condition. Theories of humor fall into three primary categories; functional or relief theories offer explanations of why we laugh and the value of laughter, stimuli or cognitive theories look at surprise and incongruities to understand what makes things funny, and superiority theories look at people’s responses to humorous events and phenomenon and why people find things funny. Whatever theories help u...

Peter Brown has become one of my new favorite illustrators and authors. I enjoy the humor in his books and his understated style of illustrating.

In much the same fashion as The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, The Numberless is a picturebook - app - augmented reality based narrative. These books are excellent examples of the "transmedia" productions we see when gaming meets children's literature. The picturebook version contains wonderful illustrations and interesting design elements. The story is rather formulaic but works.

Anthony Browne, the former Children's Literature Laureate of the UK has recently released a new picturebook called What If ? This enjoyable story documents a young boy's fear of going to a birthday party. He forgot the address and he and his mother search the houses along a street for the right home. In typical Browne fashion, what is revealed as the two of them look into the windows of various houses along the street is unexpected. Great story for facing your fears.

This is an excerpt from my review in Linguistics and Education about Reading Visual Narratives. This is an excellent resource for understanding how picturebooks work from a multimodal perspective:           The book, Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books offers educators and visual theorists a detailed analysis of the visual-verbal relations in children’s picturebooks. Aligned with systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1975, 1978) , this volume adapts the theories of visual grammar first proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) to focus attention on the verbal and visual narratives in contemporary children’s picturebooks. By doing so, the authors have presented a comprehensive analytical framework for considering the multimodal aspects of picturebooks and serves as a valuable resource for researchers and educators to approach multimodal ensembles, in particular contemporary picturebooks, with a more enlightened...

You can’t teach what you don’t know, so anyone who doesn’t know how to enjoy reading literature, thinking about it, and entering into dialogues about it shouldn’t try to teach those pleasures to others.                                                                                      Perry Nodelman Teachers can’t just read about web-based and digital resources, they have to begin exploring these resources for themselves. Teachers also need to begin thinking about how these resources might be used in their reading workshops. To help teachers move forward into the digital age, they need to be given time to explore a wide range of digital resources, time to talk with other teachers about how they have been using these resources in their classrooms, time to play arou...

In this lovely, irreverent story about a gorilla and a jackass, the divide between the digital generation and book lovers is explored in great humor. In typical Lane Smith fashion, readers are offered a look at things from a slightly different point of view. One of my favorite books to use during professional development workshops on Reading Workshop 2.0.