Using Picture Books to Support Meaning-Making in the Early Grades

As a literacy consultant working in pre-K and kindergarten classrooms, I often use the words writing and drawing interchangeably. Writing expert Katie Wood Ray, author of In Pictures and in Words: Teaching the Qualities of Good Writing Through Illustration Study, reminds us that “both writing and drawing are acts of meaning-making—they are simply generated with different composition tools.” Young illustrators often draw smiling, floating stick figures in eight Crayola colors, but there’s so much more for them to explore.

Here are seven picture books that show how illustrations and minimal text can work together to communicate ideas in clever, engaging ways.

Teaching Meaning-Making With Pictures

1. Wait, written and illustrated by Antoinette Portis: With only two words spoken throughout the entire book (“Hurry” and “Wait”), this simple but powerful pattern book shows writers of all ages that authors can communicate extraordinary meaning while using very little text. The people in this book are shown from varied perspectives (close-ups, side views, aerial views, etc.), dispelling the idea that characters always need to be drawn head-on.

Antoinette Portis’s juxtaposed “zoomed-in” and “zoomed-out” scenes create opportunities for you to discuss why illustrators create various perspectives for their readers (to show detailed emotion on faces, to share the importance of setting, to share other characters in a scene, etc.). For students who are attempting to add words (whether inventive or standard) to their stories, they can experiment with font sizes and styles to reflect the characters’ emotions.

2. Hop, written and illustrated by Jorey Hurley: Jorey Hurley’s signature style is to use single verbs across pages to tell an entire story. Her books are incredibly powerful models that show our youngest writers that tons of text isn’t always necessary to express meaning. In Hop, her repetitive drawings give young writers permission to mimic patterns and characters across pages instead of constantly generating new ideas. Yet the perspectives vary, demonstrating how illustrators use size and shape to change how characters experience a scene.

Hurley uses precise verbs that clearly convey character actions, which gives you an opportunity to build your students’ vocabulary. Similar to young writers’ storytelling, the settings remain consistent throughout the book. With a palette that includes natural shades of green, a multitude of brown tones, soft pastels, and subtle gradients, highlight for your students the idea that thinking deeply about color is important for telling a story.

3. A Squiggly Story, written by Andrew Larsen and illustrated by Mike Lowery: This text is the perfect addition to any classroom with emergent writers. As a young boy admires his older sister’s ability to write “big words and little words,” he begins to learn that his squiggles, swirls, and drawings can also create stories with meaning and emotion. Handwritten swirls, symbols, and early letter formations abound—mirroring the work of beginning writers—encouraging your students to take risks by adding text to their early stories.

Shaded illustrations contrast the main character’s thinking with the actions that take place. Students can easily emulate this technique by using different-colored paper (gray or off-white) for the two types of scenes in their work. Speech bubbles are used to show readers the conversations that are taking place. This is a perfect way to introduce the concept of dialogue to more advanced writers and have them try their own experiments.

4. Why the Face? written and illustrated by Jean Jullien: Why the Face?, by master of illustration Jean Jullien, uses the repeating phrase “Why the face?” to reveal a multitude of illustrated faces based on circumstances that show a spectrum of deep emotions. Students have the opportunity to hypothesize the reasons for the expressions on the detailed faces as they turn the fold-out pages to reveal each reason.

A simple grammar lesson on interjections can give students the chance to add their own voice to their story, mimicking Jullien’s examples. This book is an excellent model for teaching students how to add detail to faces in their drawings by considering various examples of eyes, eyebrows, noses, hair, mouths, and even tongues. The primary shapes used throughout the book exemplify how basic shapes can be used to build more detailed illustrations.

5. Green, written and illustrated by Laura Vaccaro Seeger: In this Caldecott Honor book, Linda Vaccaro Seeger manages to tell a story with great depth and detail simply by using different shades of green. Her signature cutouts—something young writers can attempt—present a novel technique that will have teachers and students doing double takes to see how she connects pages and ideas together. Even more deeply than Hop, Green uses various shades of a single color to add specificity and meaning. 

Teachers can encourage students to use a variety of pencils, paints, or larger crayon sets to play with shades in their own drawings. Additionally, this book is a wonderful bridge for teaching about all kinds of adjectives (“forest green,” “sea green,” “slow green,” “wacky green,” “shaded green,” etc.).

6. Be Who You Are, written and illustrated by Todd Parr: In my opinion, Todd Parr books are a must for pre-K and kindergarten classroom libraries. All of his books perfectly combine simple illustrations and patterned phrases with social and emotional learning. He is the quintessential mentor author for beginning writers, speaking directly to their hearts and minds.

He uses simple shapes to build detailed scenes, along with bright, bold colors that convey voice and individuality.

Teachers can model step-by-step instructions on how Parr builds characters beyond stick figures using simple shapes, also adding different hair, facial features, clothing patterns, accessories, movement lines, speech bubbles, and short phrases. Examples of environmental prints add context and meaning to his settings, showing students that full sentences aren’t always necessary to convey deeper meaning in their writing.

7. Taking a Bath with the Dog and Other Things That Make Me Happy, written and illustrated by Scott Menchin: We follow Sweet Pea as she searches for the answer to the question, “What makes you happy?” Scott Menchin shows young writers all the ways that we can place characters in our books (sitting, lying, standing, kneeling, bird’s-eye view) using simple but interesting patterns on clothing, furniture, wallpaper, rugs, and animal fur/skin.

Menchin shares an assortment of drawing techniques in this adorable and clever mentor text, perfect for primary writers to try out. He consistently uses horizon lines to separate the wall and floor, encouraging illustrators to place characters in more realistic locations. For advanced writers, teachers can encourage students to use distinct fonts, as Menchin does, to indicate dialogue and sentence fragments in intentional ways.

Illustration studies are a powerful tool, yet many teachers wait until students can write the letters of the alphabet to start teaching writing. With the right mentor texts, our beginning writers can learn how to communicate meaningful events, feelings, and stories through illustrations before they ever form letters, words, and sentences.