The Treats of Friendship

Laura Vaccaro Seeger

A deep and abiding friendship between two very different personalities forms the core of Dog and Bear: Tricks and Treats (and all the Dog and Bear books) by Laura Vaccaro Seeger. Their latest adventure plays up those contrasts using some time-honored Halloween traditions.

Dog takes risks; Bear is more prudent. Dog inspires Bear to try new things; Bear encourages Dog to slow down, think things through. Seeger's stories grow out of the friends' personalities and how they resolve their dilemmas. And they do solve their problems themselves, without any help from grown-ups. So how do they react to Halloween rituals? What if Dog were to misunderstand how trick-or-treating works? Instead of giving out candy, he confiscates it (not meaning any harm, of course). Children are in on the joke, and Dog doesn't recognize his faux pas. Costume hunting and prank playing (much more benign than egging or TP-ing, of course) make up the themes of the other two stories.

With just a sentence per page, these adventures feel complete and make the ideal books for beginning readers as well as picture book lovers. We can't wait to see what Dog and Bear will do next.

Wordless Books & Visual Literacy

For a child who cannot yet read--who cannot decode letters as symbols that represent sounds--wordless books such as Journey by Aaron Becker give them a way to tell the story they see. 

From Journey by Aaron Becker

Children will notice the only colors that pop in the opening pages of Journey: a boy's purple crayon, and a girl's red one. Like Crockett Johnson's Harold and his purple crayon, the girl uses her red one to create a world. In her case, it leads her out of her alienating sepia-toned cityscape and into a lush world of forests, interconnected waterways and steampunk airships. Eventually, a purple bird leads her back to the boy and his purple crayon. She is no longer alone. 

Stephen Savage's Where's Walrus? is a terrific introduction to wordless books for children. Its direct, implicit puzzle--finding Walrus, who's escaped from New York's Central Park Zoo--allows them to pick the hero from a line-up based on his unique characteristics (flippers, tail, tusks, etc.). The book gets them thinking about patterns, likenesses and differences. Generous white space and bold colors repeated for maximum effect make this an ideal book for giving children the idea of how to "read" a purely visual narrative. 

Green by Laura Vaccaro Seeger includes a few words, to describe the bountiful shades of green that she showcases in the book, but the larger narrative goes unstated. A parent-child relationship that centers around a tree, which begins as a sapling and grows to be the anchor of their home, suggests the cycle of life. Her greens go from the concrete and literal ("lime green" / "pea green") to the more abstract ("all green" / "never green"). She uses die-cuts in the pages to train children's eyes on the details she wants to reveal to them. It's an ingenious way to demonstrate ways to inspect artwork carefully and unlock its secrets.

Jerry Pinkney's Caldecott Medal–winning The Lion and the Mouse, with its breathtaking landscapes of the Serengeti teeming with hidden treasures, invites children to pore over the pictures for flowers and creatures, large and small. Pinkney's gorgeous spreads of grandeur composed from the tiniest details echo Aesop's overriding theme of the interconnectedness and interdependence of nature's plants and species. 

Open any one of these books (and hopefully all four) to unlock how much your youngster has to say about what he or she sees.

Visual Literacy

Mary Murphy's (I Kissed the Baby!) latest board book, Quick Duck!, attests to why her storytelling is ideally suited to this format. She repeats the title phrase, then lets youngest book lovers know--in just a few words and brush strokes--where the duckling is on the path to (as we soon discover) his or her family.

Last weekend, at the Bank Street College of Education, the Center for Children's Literature (where I serve as interim director) hosted its first Writers Lab mini-conference, "Early Childhood Literature: What Do You Need to Know?" Laura Vaccaro Seeger delivered the closing keynote, and focused on visual literacy. "At some point, we stop seeing things the way a young child does," Seeger said. We stop noticing things. Seeger skillfully uses die-cut pages in many of her books to draw the eye to specific details--books such as The Hidden Alphabet, and her two Caldecott Honor books, First the Egg and Green. With a turn of the page, we continue to notice those details within the context of a larger picture. She teaches us how to see, to notice, all over again.

Seeger also talked about a game she played with her boys when they were little: "How little can I show and still convey an expression of surprise?" Is it the eyes, the mouth? This game later became the basis for her book Walter Was Worried.

Like Seeger, Murphy understands the importance of conveying only the essential details. She keeps the pages clean and the focus on her duck, with its thick black outline against a pastel, mostly white background. A thin green line makes a reed; a thick purple stroke transforms it into a cat tail. The path of muddy webbed footprints betray a sense of urgency and also tell us that the feathered hero knows just where to go ("Out of the mud!"; "Under the hedge!"; "Over the stones!") to arrive safely to a waiting mother and siblings.

The Art of Reinvention

Laura Vaccaro Seeger

Let us meditate for a moment on the art of Laura Vaccaro Seeger.  She reinvents the picture book genre, the beginning reader, the alphabet book. She uses die-cut holes to reveal hidden details. In The Hidden Alphabet, in First the Egg, in Green. She makes us take a second look at the things we thought we knew—leaves and trees, sun and moon, snowman and stars. That tree we take for granted was not always there. It took generations to grow. Let us take note of it, she seems to say. Let us stand under its majesty, drink in its shade, rest among its roots.

So let us meditate on the leaves, on the egg, on all the things we miss while going about our daily business. Let us pause and take in the green we take for granted.

The Power of Choice

Children make choices every day, but they may not always be conscious of what they are doing. They choose chocolate over vanilla. They choose blue socks over green socks. Those choices are easy. But what about the decision to include a neighbor in a game or to leave that child out? Sometimes it feels much harder to invite a child to play than it does to simply not make that phone call or avoid walking by his or her house—or leave him or her standing on the sidelines.

Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s What If? is brilliantly understated. She makes no judgments. She simply shows a scene in which two seals are playing in the water with a beach ball, and the arrival of a third seal on the beach introduces a situation where a choice must be made. Because these are seals, Seeger keeps them relatively neutral—their only differences are in the markings on their coats. It’s not about one seal luring another away with flash or style. The gray seal comes to the beach to retrieve the ball. The gray seal can run off with the ball and with the newly arrived brown seal and abandon the beige seal in the water. Or it can return with the ball to the beige seal and leave out the newly arrived brown seal; or all three can play together (the final scene).

This book is a great conversation-starter for when these situations arise, whether your youngster is the one being left out, or party to leaving out another child. It’s also a nice way to open up a discussion before a situation like this ever arises. We all know that summer with its long stretches of unstructured time is ideal for pulling together a neighborhood game of hide-and-seek or gathering everyone at the baseball diamond, and situations like the one featured in What If? are likely to occur. Another title that touches on a related theme, if one neighborhood child is dominating the playing field, is Kathryn Otashi’s One. The idea of one person reaching out to or standing up for another is simple yet powerful. And both of these books demonstrate to young people that any child can make that choice.