anthropomorphised as friends. Novice readers have to understand stories as a particular
kind of imaginative activity. An important category of books is made up of those which
seem particularly good at teaching the game of reading. Books such as Where’s Spot?
(1980) by the British artist, Eric Hill, or Each, Peach, Pear, Plum (1984) by the Ahlbergs,
invite children to join in, predict, set up expectations about what will happen next. A story
such as John Burningham’s Come Away from the Water, Shirley (1977) shows that a
story may, literally, have two sides. Books that ‘teach the game of reading’ are often
made for sharing—and this notion of learning reading as ‘apprenticeship’ has been
imported into the vocabulary of the school-based teaching of reading in Britain (Harrison
and Coles 1992), the USA (Goodman 1986), Canada, and Australia (Brown and Mathie
1990). The significant picture book author-artists who have emerged since the 1960s
have stimulated a refined critical appreciation (see, for example, Lewis 1990). They
match the craft of the story-teller shower with the literary possibilities available to the
young. Some books for this age range are all pictures, such as Shirley Hughes’ Up and
Up (1979), Jan Ormerod’s Sunshine (1983), and Pat Hutchins’s Changes, Changes (1971).
They enable the child to control the whole process of taking meaning from books from
the very beginning. The picture book is not mere preparation for ‘real’ literary experience;
artists have managed to place narrative patterns as old as story-telling into the
contemporary universe of school, play, families and cultural contexts which are
accessible to modern children.
Five- to seven-year-olds have a taste for realism and an insatiable curiosity about how
things are, and what people do. It is, however, simplistic to label stories which deal with
the homely and the accessible as ‘realism’. The best stories for 5-to 7-year-olds slow
down, and turn into art, the action, sounds, sights, feelings of childhood. The universal
experiences—birthdays, starting school, having a baby brother or sister, losing a tooth,
being left awake at night—can shown to be the same for everyone. Form is important.
When one reads stories by the best writers in the genre—Ted Greenwood’s stories Ginnie
(1979); Dorothy Edwards’s My Naughty Little Sister (1969 and sequels) (one of the very
few nameless characters of all fiction), the Frog and Toad stories of Arnold Lobel (from
Frog and Toad are Friends (1970))—one sees how deceptively simple techniques can
work. The length of chapters, and the interplay of episodes help story-tellers to catch the
slowness of childhood time. Events often happen all in a day and can be held in the
head. Crude divisions into ‘realism’ and ‘fantasy’ ignore the fact that, for children at this
age, the line between the two is not a clear one; the fabulous often lies just beneath the
surface of the ordinary.
In stories for the young, first pages tend to be crucial parts of the invitation. In a
classic story like Helen Morgan’s Mrs Pinny and the Blowing Day (1991) theme, plot, image
and action cohere for the young reader-listener.
Stories are often the means through which children from 5 to 7 can come to confront,
and begin to understand, their fears and anxieties. This feature of literature can
sometimes be taken to extremes. In the USA in the 1960s and 1970s there was a strong
feeling that children’s books could be, in some ways, a cure for childhood problems. In a
sense, this returns us to the origins of children’s books and the view that they should
somehow socialise children. But it is certainly the case that fears and anxieties can be
miniaturised, or made manageable through stories. Tucker (1981:62–66) provides a
BOOKS FOR YOUNGER READERS 377