Sophisticated Picture Books

How might picture books be sophisticated?
Ask anyone in room 10 and they will give you the answer.

We recently started on reading picture books. You may think all picture books are aimed at young kids, but some are actually a lot more complicated then you think. In class we have worked out what aspects the book has to have to be sophisticated, and these are:

• The book must have a theme (eg. loss, remembrance, friends)
• It also must have a hidden message with layers to it
• The illustrations sometimes give more meaning than the words
• They use more complicated language in the book
• And the layout is sometimes different than a regular picture book.

We have been looking at a particular book at the moment called 'The Red Tree'. This book uses very minimal amount of words, but each sentence has a very deep meaning. As one of our activities for this, we have been doing some drama to act out each page- and then we got a bit carried away and made a cool video of it, but unfortunately the camera ran out of space in the process, so we didn't get it on here.

So now, go down to the school library for a while and look at some of the sophisticated picture books. It's just as good as a chapter book.