Why don’t the words exactly match up with the images? Why is the type so small?
These are questions that came up for me when I was teaching preschool and I was reading countless picture books with young children.
The books I remember most from my childhood were early readers such as Mr. Pine’s Purple House and Billy Brown Makes Something Grand. These were such great stories, silly and entertaining, and they had basic words that repeated themselves just enough on each page to retain them.
Once more, it’s all about storytelling. “Remember, stories — historically — were oral, not printed,” the school librarian explained to me.
Sometimes books for children get it right, and sometimes not so much. There’s a lot involved in serving children’s early reading needs.