Picture Books for the Literacy Hour

Book excerpt: First Published in 2000. Over the last 30 years, growth in the popularity and provision of books for children has been remarkable. The quality and inventiveness of children's authors and illustrators have led some to think of the picture book as a new art form. This book is a celebration of some of this work and it concentrates on the potential that picture books have for the teaching and learning of literacy. The aim of this book is to encourage colleagues to take a closer look at some of their favourite picture books and to see how they can be used as a starting point for enjoyable and challenging literacy work in primary classrooms. Believing that teachers do not need to rely on schemes to structure their English curriculum and with this in mind this book includes 24 popular titles that have been identified in terms of their potential for delivering exciting text-, sentence- and word-level work. Written to be used as a resource, and anticipate that many readers will be most interested the commentaries on the picture books (contained in Chapters 3- 7) and the accompanying photocopiable activity sheets.