Mama, let’s read two stories!

“Mama, let’s read two stories!”

This is a familiar refrain from my 4 year old, Z who insists on a picture book read aloud every night before going to bed. He dislikes going to bed. So he tries to prolong his waking hours by insisting we read at least two stories. In these nightly rituals which mark the close of yet another day, Z sees and says unexpected things, opening for me a small window into the world of how children learn to read.  He often doesn’t respond to pictures as I expect him to but he listens carefully as he is later able to retrieve new information to make connections with his own lived world. In our shared reading of picture books, I realize I’m doing much more than narrating a single story to him. I’m opening up possibilities of endless connections and multiple stories for him.

We were reading Manjula Padmanabhan’s Mama, What is the Night?, a delightfully illustrated book that offers a window to creatures of the night through the eyes of a little girl. We’re on the page where the jellyfish are explaining what the night means to them when Z’s attention suddenly goes to the little girl. To my utter surprise and unpreparedness, he asks me in a rather irritated tone, “Mama, why is the girl wearing shoes inside her house?” I’m stumped. So, like a well meaning adult I try to throw the question back at him, thinking aloud, “Ya, why is she wearing shoes inside her house? What do you think?” He thinks for a bit and speculates, “Maybe it (pointing to the ground) is hurting her.” Satisfied with that answer, we move on. We came back to the story a few days later and again, he stops me at the same page with the same question, only more irritated, “Arre, why is she wearing shoes?” This time I don’t say anything.  Much to my relief, his sense of indignation almost immediately gives way to speculation as he says, “Is her house cold?”

A similar scene unfolded when we were reading Moira Butterfield’s breathtakingly illustrated story Stardragon, a strange and magical tale of a kitten that turns into a dragon every time it’s scared. We’re on the page where Alfy, the protagonist meets the kitten for the first time. I try to draw his attention to the exquisitely drawn magical dragon amidst beautiful pink flowers. But to my absolute consternation, the only thing little Z wants to know is, “Why is he (Alfy) wearing formal shoes?”

In the years between rolling off his back and beginning to walk, he’s been closely watching his father get dressed for work. From his father and others around, he has also learnt significant details about types of shoes and can now distinguish between formal shoes and casual shoes! He also knows that we typically don’t wear shoes inside the house. It’s lovely to see how he is developing a capacity for close observation and this probably explains his irritation at seeing girls and boys in the stories wearing shoes inside their homes.

In 1972 John Berger wrote Ways of Seeing, a short but exquisite treatise on art that redefined how we look at paintings by de-mystifying the aura behind high-brow art in powerful ways. He opens the book by saying, “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.”  It is by seeing the world that surrounds him that the child slowly begins to recognize his own place in relation to other people and things that he sees. Typically, Z refuses to make predictions when I try to get him to talk about a book cover. But once we’re in the thick of a good engaging story, he’s paying attention to innocuous details in the pictures he sees. But it’s not random pictures that fascinate him. As Berger says, we don’t just see things for what they are but we see things for what they are in relation to us.  He says, “Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.” This is exactly what Z is doing when he’s seeing art unfold in front of his eyes in a book. He’s trying to see the pictures on a page in relation to himself, in relation to how he sees his world. No wonder he quizzes me about shoes when he observes them in the stories we read.

Though his world is teeming with people and things, it is select things that really catch his fancy. In fact, it’s really hard to predict what will fascinate him. Much to my dismay, we recently had a pigeon build a nest and lay two eggs amidst our plants in the flower bed. I decided to let them be. Despite the menace, it would be a new experience for my son. Every day we carefully watched the eggs as we watered the plants. With the pigeon keeping a roving eye on all our movements, we excitedly talked about when it would hatch and what would happen once the eggs hatched. I thought this might be the perfect time to bring back Our John by Veronique Van den Abeele, a book we’d read some weeks ago. It’s a sweet little story about a group of animals who find a stray egg. No one knows whose baby it is and they fight over who would adopt it and what they would name it. In a surprising twist, the egg hatches just as they’re fighting over it. I imagined us discussing the eggs in our flower bed as the story goes on but it wasn’t the animals and birds or the egg that caught his fancy.  In fact, the art in this book didn’t engage him at all. It was the animal sounds that sparked a conversation. Hearing the chicken ‘clack’ he excitedly reminded me of another book we’d read, “Mama, Click Clack Moo!” he squealed. Click Clack Moo, Cows that Type by Doreen Cronin, is a whimsical tale about chickens and cows on a farm who go on strike and demand their rights. He was making connections not only with what he saw around him but also with stories he was listening to.

Denise Von Stockar, a Swiss children’s book critic, identifies 5 distinct stages in the way a child looks at pictures in a book. In the first stage, the child points at various objects that interest him on the picture. Later, he points at them and names them. Slowly, the child can point at and name the image’s elements while telling a story. But it is not yet the book’s story; it is a personal story that comes from the associations the child makes between the picture and his own life. This is exactly what Z was doing when we read Mama, what is the night and Stardragon; he identified objects he had personal associations with. Von Stockar says, slowly the child succeeds in pointing at and talking about the picture’s elements while telling an end to the story in the book, detached from his personal experience: he knows that there is a difference between his own story and that of the book. In the final stage, he points at the elements not only of an isolated picture, but of all the set of images that he can use as a support to tell, in a narrative language, the entire story related in the book.

I saw this slowly unfolding when we read Mahasweta Devi’s Our Incredible Cow.  I was curious to see how he would respond to the art in this book.  An endearing tale about a family’s relationship with its cow, I thought it might be a bit complex for him to grasp. But surprisingly, not only was he following the narrative but also making meaning of the unconventional artwork in the book. Looking at the cover page, he unusually enquired why the cow was blue. He was obviously contrasting it with some image he had of cows he’d seen.  When the cow eats up books, Ruchi Shah the illustrator creates a quirky image of the cow using only photos of books stacked together. Keenly following the narrative, he pointed to the image and asked, “Why is it full of books?” He hadn’t yet understood that it was a cow. I tried to show him that it was actually a cow represented through books because he ate up the books. I wasn’t sure he got it but we moved on. As we turned the pages, he saw a green cow and then a red cow. He slowly began speculating, “Maybe he ate leaves! Maybe he ate tomatoes or apples or onions?” Something was snapping into place somewhere in his mind’s eye. Z was beginning to relate the pictures beyond his own personal experiences and concerns. This also marked a big shift in his early reading strategies – he was beginning to grasp the ‘whole’ story as opposed to seeing it as fragmented pieces of text on a page. Von Stocker says, “Learning to read is learning to see.” This probably best explains how art in picture books can be a beautiful bridge between orality and literacy for young children.

This impulse to read pictures and the irresistible urge to make meaning of what he saw was most striking when we read Claudia Legnazzi’s I have a Home. This brilliant wordless picture book brought out the most words a read aloud had so far drawn out of him. He saw the cover page and declared, “This is a man-house. Man plus house.” As we kept flipping the pages, he didn’t ask me for a story but kept talking instead.

“Who lives inside?”

“Why does the house keep moving?”

“Who moves the house?”

“It is in snow….It is in snow water.”

“What a huge car! Does it work? Who is driving it?”

“What a long elephant! It travels slowly.”

“It’s a snake. (pointing at the tortoise’s underbelly.)And this is a tortoise. It’s a snake house.”

“It’s on top of a plant.”

“Is it tired, the house? It’s on mud.”

“It’s on water.”

“It’s on a circle. It’s full of trees. Look…1..2..3..(counts till 13)

“It’s in mud.”

“Whose house is it?”

Kokaachi is another story with minimal text. It is a really short story in the matchbox book format about a lurking folk monster by the same name who catches little boys who don’t eat food. The protagonist sets out to prove to his mother that, “There’s no such thing as a Kokaachi,” by asking around in the village if anyone’s seen it. The fear of the unknown is evoked artfully by a different representation of Kokaachi on each page. Z took an immediate fancy to this story and the storybook format. He has read the matchbox book a few hundred times since, with the result that the matchbox is now tattered.  I don’t know what’s going on in his brain every time he flips through the story. But I do know he’s making connections because when we were looking at the whimsical, magical pictures in Stardragon again one day, he stops me and asks, “Eh, there’s no such thing as Kokaachi, no?” In making this inter-textual connection, Z is revealing that he’s no longer relating to isolated pictures on a page but to the thrust of the larger narrative!

What I saw unfold with Z is not special or peculiar to him. This is probably happening to most children his age who are exposed to a rich and varied collection of picture books. The crucial thing, however, is the gentle support we as adults can extend in helping them enter the highly complex world of reading. For adults it calls for a lot of patient listening, sensitivity, curbing natural instincts to give quick answers and becoming comfortable with silences. Unlike schools which usually focus on decoding language, early reading experiences like these can nurture a child to become a thoughtful reader. Above anything else, these experiences can put the child on a path of realising that reading is a deeply personal act where each one can construct his or her own meaning of the text by integrating his or her lived experiences with it.

References:

Berger, J., Dibb, M., & BBC Enterprises. (1972). Ways of seeing. London: BBC Enterprises, Penguin Publishers

Von Stockar, Denise. (2006). The Importance of Literacy and Books in Children’s Development: Intellectual, Affective and Social Dimensions. Retrieved from, http://www.ibby.org/awards-activities/activities/ibby-yamada-fund/ibby-yamada-2006-rwanda/the-importance-of-literacy-and-books-in-childrens-development/