S2E6: Children's Picture Books

Summary Keywords 

children’s books, early literacy, visual storytelling, read aloud, brain development, illustration process, book creation, sensory engagement, imaginative reading, childhood memories, inclusive stories, local literature, identity building, emotional development, visual literacy, diverse narratives, creative reading, storytelling techniques, children’s publishing, book representation 

00:02 Host, Loh Chin Ee

[Reading an extract from Peter Rabbit...]  

Peter Rabbit lives in a sand bank underneath a very big fir tree. One spring morning, it is time to decorate the burrow and to get ready for Easter. Before the egg hunt, Peter runs errands for his mother at Ginger and Pickles shop, he finds his friends fetching tasty groceries for Easter. In Mr. McGregor's garden, cheeky Peter pulls up some onions, turnips and radishes for an Easter feast. Look out, Peter. Here comes Mr. McGregor.  

That was an extract from Peter Rabbit and the Egg Hunt, based on a character from Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Some other children’s books you might be familiar with are The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss, Winnie the Pooh by A A Milne, The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.  

The book that I read, Peter Rabbit and the Egg Hunt, is a treasured picturebook. It was given as a gift when I had my first baby, and I read it aloud to both my children. The book had lift the flap and pullout features, which use to amuse my curious children, eager to lift the flap, even if they already know what is under from repeated readings. The book is rather worn, and I’ve used tape to keep some sections together, but I keep it as a precious gift and reminder of childhood and friendship.  

In today’s episode, we explore the appeal of children’s books. Why do some people, and it’s not just children, love children’s picture books so much? How are picture books written and illustrated? And must these books always end with “they live happily ever after”? 

Chapter 1: The appeal of children’s books  

Picture books are a unique book form, as they combine visuals and texts together in a book format. Often no more than 32 pages and limited in word count, picture books can range from simple board books, introducing young children to nouns and concepts to profound stories with universal themes. While they’re designed for preschoolers, many of the best loved stories have timeless appeal to both children and adults.  

Shannon Ong, bookstore owner of Woods in the Books, a children’s bookstore, loves picturebooks so much that she opened a bookstore with co-owner and hubby, Mike Foo. 

02:45 Shannon Ong 

Actually, when we started a bookstore 15 years ago, we were not parents yet, so it just purely because we love picture books, and then we see picture books as an art form stories in terms of like pictures and language together. My husband, he's an illustrator, so all the drawings and the murals that you see in our shop is actually his illustrations. Basically, it's very DIY. Everyone thought that, oh we are from, like, probably from overseas brand, and then, like, we hire artists to do all these. But it's actually, no, it's actually very much everything DIY. He likes and he's good at visual arts illustrations. And I kind of, I'm a reader, so and we both like the poetic way of how the visual art illustrations come together with words to form beautiful stories.  

03:41 Host, Loh Chin Ee 

Woods in the Books first opened in 2009 in a shophouse in Club Street. They then moved to Millenia Walk before settling at Yong Siak Street in Tiong Bahru for 11 years. There are now two branches, one at 206 East Coast Road in Katong and another at 46 Kim Yan Road at New Bahru. They also manage Books Ahoy! In Orchard Forum and Orchard Centrepoint.  

How did Shannon and Mike come up with the name Woods in the Books? 

04:06 Shannon Ong 

Actually, we have whole long list of the name. So I can't remember how they came to that, but we finally decided to go with this name it's because we think that there are a lot of things to discover in the in the forest and in the nature, and a lot of picture book stories and if you go back way back to all the so called classic fairy tales, like the Green Fairy Tale, all these a lot of stories happen in the jungles, in the forest, in the nature. That's where a lot of room for imagination, a lot of possibility and adventures. So that's one aspect of the name, and we didn't want to put the swap the words around, become Books in the Woods, because the focus is in on the books, not the place, not the bookstore, per say. And also, of course, like, you know, being a physical bookstore that's selling physical books, there's the source of paper from. So in a way, we hope that if people do think about the name or how we all started, it’s back to the origin, where we started from. So in a way, it's also a reminder to ourselves. 

05:24 Host, Loh Chin Ee 

The value of a picture book lies in the combination of illustrations and texts. Dr James Hutton, a pediatrician from the University of Cincinnati, has been using MRI or Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technology to conduct studies of reading and preschoolers. In one 2017 study, his team had 28 children aged three to five years old do three things. First, they listened to an audio book read by the author. Second, they listened to a story read by the author and looked at the illustrations projected to a screen, very much like reading a picture book. Finally, they watched and listened to a video version of a storybook. The findings are striking. When the children were listening to an audio book, some neural networks fired up, but not the visualisation section of the brain. When watching the video, everything else shut down, except for the visualisation section. But when reading a picture book, different areas of the neural networks were fired up and connecting to each other. When we spend time reading picture books to children, we're helping their brains to make crucial neural connections vital for brain development and their later growth. Shannon tells us that children are processing visuals, text and audio when listening to a picture book being read aloud. 

06:58 Shannon Ong 

There's so many things going on when the children not only just listening to you to when the adult reads to them before they can read by themselves. There's a lot of things they can see in the pictures, a lot of details, a lot of non written details that actually enhance the narrative and actually build the story in a more dimensional way. Along the way, the process of reading that, actually children, I would say, they observe, and they also using a lot of different skills and sensory at same time, not just like listening, but they're looking at the pictures, and they try to link between the words and the pictures to complete the narrative.  

07:44 Host, Loh Chin Ee 

If you’ve seen a child pouring over a picture book, whether alone or with an adult, asking questions or fully immersed in the story, you are looking at an act of what Wolfgang Iser, a reader response theorist calls active and creative reading. A well-written picture book engages the reader through gaps in the narrative, and grants space for the reader to be absorbed in inventive play. By offering picture books to children, we are offering them spaces for literacy development and creative imagination. 

Although a picturebook may seem short compared to a novel, it is not an easy task to conceptualise, write and illustrate a picturebook. Texts and words must come together in a coherent whole to excite, inspire and immerse the potential reader.  

To understand the process of creating a children’s book, I invite Alan John and Quek Hong Shin to tell me about how they worked together. Alan John is a journalist and author, he has written three books: Grandma’s Tiger, The One and Only Inuka, Ubin Elephant and Harry Hippo’s Holiday. Hong Shin has illustrated all three books. The books are written in English, but The One and Only Inuka has been translated to Singapore’s other official languages of Chinese, Malay and Tamil, and are available at our public libraries. 

Alan explains how he became a children’s book writer. 

09:28 Alan John 

So I was a journalist my whole life, and working at the Straits Times, every now and then some animal would be in the news. I came to Singapore in 1980 from Kuala Lumpur, and the Singapore Zoo is really a special place. I've been going to the Singapore Zoo from the 1980s and then later, when we had children, in the 1990s a lot as well. So animals from the zoo were in the paper a lot. Every time there was a new baby born in the zoo, it was in the newspaper. Every time Ah Meng did something, she was in the paper, and she became such a star attraction. And then when Inuka was born, it was like the biggest thing, you know now looking back, it's like the most ridiculous thing, having polar bear born on the equator. But everyone loved Inuka, and it was a big deal. So there will be these stories that would turn up in the paper and...and they would just happen. And then, every now and then, some funny story would happen. Like they took Ah Meng to MacRitchie to do a video shoot, and halfway through, she got tired of it all, and she went up the tree, and she wouldn't come down, and so they spent three days trying to get her down. Another time, there would be some other story. And then there was this elephant that turned up on Pulau Ubin, and you know, all hell broke loose for several days. And people thought that it was a wild elephant and they were in danger. And then it turned out not to be, so it was kind of a baby elephant. And that was around the time my daughter was about maybe two years old or so. I'd be at work and dealing with this news coming out of the local news desk, and then it went on for a while. I'd come home and say, Guess what? There was this elephant and so on. So the result of that was that I did my own picture book for my daughter, Nicola and kept it, you know. And then, of course, the years went by and it sat there. So sometime in 2015, around there, my wife kept saying to me, “what are you doing with this story? It's an interesting story. Do something with it…” And then I met Hong Shin one day and said, “you know, I have this book, this story book, I think it's worth doing something with it. Will you illustrate it?” Because I had drawn my pictures and they were horrible and he said, Oh, your pictures are all right. He lies to me like that all the time. And I said, “no, I need a proper illustrator for this story. And do you think it will work?” And then he said, Yeah, he thinks it can work. 

11:47 Host, Loh Chin Ee 

Alan elaborates on the process of collaborative book creation.  

11:52 Alan John 

The way I write the picture books is that I need a storyboard, so I kind of sketch out what I think the story is going to look like and how it flows. And so I write my words with the storyboard in mind. So I know the book has to be about 36 to 40 pages, and it'll look kind of like this. So I have an idea in mind, and then my sketches are very basic and don't look like real people and animals and all that, but there you go. Then I'll just hand that over to Hong Shin and say, this is roughly how I see it going. And then I leave it to him, and that's the best part, because I have an idea of what it's going to look like. Then he takes a month or two or more sometimes, and when he comes back, I'm amazed, and it feels wonderful, and I'm surprised, and I think, “wow, this is wonderful” because he puts himself into it, you know. So even as he is kind of following my story board, he is doing new and fresh and surprising things. He's adding characters, and you know, I may have a story about the elephant or the tiger or whatever, and he adds these other animals into it. The people in the background, I love the people in the background because he'll have some characters who repeat and turn up in some of the other stories and other books as well. That's Hong Shin in there. 

13:16 Host, Loh Chin Ee 

Hong Shin writes and illustrates his own picture books, but when he gets the story from Alan, he takes a different approach from illustrating his own books. 

13:25 Quek Hong Shin 

Usually, I will ask the author story for any sketches they have. Alan did show me the sketches that he has done, and I want to be as close as to the vision the writer has. I want to respect the material. I do not want to just take over and kind of make it my own, but I want it to be similar to the vision that Ellen has for my own stories. I can, kind of like do whatever I want, but for material that comes from someone else. I do want to be respectful of the material. Then I will actually get Alan to print out the story on paper, because I will do my sketches right next to his words. I feel that helps when I just do very quick doodles, really messy sketches next to his words, before I go to my computer. Nowadays, I use my iPad to do my initial sketches, but the really raw, conceptual sketches are put down on paper. Then I'll transfer my ideas to the iPad, and I'll start doing my second round of sketches, and I'll show it to Alan to see whether he has any more changes that he wants to make. And if he's all right with the ideas that I have, I will fine tune the illustrations. I will do the outlines, and I'll start filling in the color. Depending on the deadline, sometimes, if I do not have the luxury of time, I will very quickly move on to the final drawings from the sketches. I'll always start with pencil and paper first. I also feel like when I'm sketching it out, I'm also thinking and making changes along the way, and really helps with the digestion of the words as well. 

15:11 Host, Loh Chin Ee 

For some books, the picture illustrates exactly what the words say, but in many picture books, the visual does a lot more for the story and for the character. What would Peter Rabbit or Winnie the Pooh be without the iconic character illustrations that are so well loved and recognised, and if you look closely enough, you'll often find little details in the visuals that add layers to the story. 

15:36 Alan John 

Of course, he will have some fun at my expense as well, because I have a character in the animal books, and he's the animal expert who turns up to solve the mystery or find out what happened to the elephant or whatever. And I always had in mind Bernard Harrison, who was the former chief executive of the Singapore Zoo, and he was this larger-than-life character who was always in the news when all these stories happened, and quite a flamboyant character, you know, and never dull. So I had him in mind as I had this character, Dr Sunny Banuna in the story, and Hong Shin had some fun with that, because he made that character look like me. Okay, so he's this man with round glasses and a mustache and so on. And so now sometimes when, when we are doing these readings in preschools or or even my friends' children, when we come to that page and Sunny Banuna turns up, they say, “Oh, Uncle Alan, you're here. Here you are.” Okay. And so there's Hong Shin doing his thing. And I love it. 

16:42 Host, Loh Chin Ee 

I chapter three, broadening children's picture books. If one looks to the original fairy tales retold by Hans Christian Andersen, a Danish writer, one would realise that these children's stories did not shy away from dealing with complex and difficult issues. Unlike Disney remakes of happy ever after endings. For example, in the Little Mermaid, there is no happy ending for the Little Mermaid, her prince married someone else, and she turned to foam because she would not kill him for her freedom. Today, there is a wide range of children's books, including those that deal with difficult topics such as death, poverty and disaster. Shannon tells us how she makes an effort to balance out her book collection in the store to ensure that parents and children can be exposed to both popular books as well as books dealing with difficult topics that she thinks children should be exposed to. 

17:44 Shannon Ong 

for the last many years. I don't really go with the logic of numbers. I don't analyse the titles or the data a lot of time, if you are talking about the new titles that I decided to stock, most of the times, going by gut feel and taking risk. And a lot of time I try to experiment. So when I say taking risk means I'm taking experiments. Sometimes I do try to push the boundary by stalking some difficult topics books. It could be about war, about poverty. You know, we know what's going on in the world now, but these are the books that I feel that it shouldn't be made invisible. It should be made available, even though there is just a few person who will buy or they may not buy in, may stay on my shelf, yeah, become a dead stock. But of course, to balance off with the sustainability of the bookstore, the business aspect, we, of course, will also have to stock some titles that's quite mainstream, yeah, that fulfill, I will say, fulfill the need for most of the people. I guess that is the purpose of reading. Reading is important not just because it makes us literate. It's not just because it educated in an academic way. When you read in a very diversified and inclusive manner, then it makes one a more complete person. It opens up our mind and view. 

19:33 Host, Loh Chin Ee 

our Singapore children's picture book scene has also been expanding, and children today have a wide range of choices when it comes to books about Singapore and books written and illustrated by Singapore authors, such locally situated books are important because they often children a vision of the multicultural world in which they live and the various traditions in Singapore which are not seen in books from elsewhere in. Alan and Hong Shin tell us more.  

20:02 Quek Hong Shin 

I feel there's a need to have a more local literature for children, especially so when I started a decade ago, there were not many books that talk about Singapore, places, people who live here, our culture, our lives, they are but compared to what we read from UK, US, it's just a very small percentage. And I want to change that. I feel children in local schools especially should read more local literature. And interestingly enough, international schools have been reading a lot of all these books about Singapore as well, and I think that's wonderful, because they learn more about our country by reading the books that me and my fellow illustrators and authors have written about Singapore.  

20:52 Alan John 

So much has changed in the last 30 years. When my kids were small in the 1990s reading was a very big part of what we did with both of them, and my wife would go book shopping, and I'd go book shopping to here in Singapore and elsewhere. And really, we were buying books from other places. The best books came from other places. There weren't many books written with a Singapore background. So we would look for all kinds of interesting books, beyond the fairy tales and kind of books that we grew up on ourselves, there would be a shortage of books about children who were a different color. My kids are Indian, and you don't see dark colored kids in many books, so the closest we'd get would be to find a story like amazing grace, about a young black girl in America who wants to be something, and so she's the central character in the story, which is unusual. And so we do that, or the Miss Frizzle science books were interesting for the range of diverse kids in the classroom and the things they did and how they dress and so on. So that was the best we could do then. Now it's so different. Now, when we go to these book festival events and so on, there's such a wide range of Singapore books, and it's great because it means Singapore kids can pick up books that have children who are Singaporean looking in them. The backdrops are local. They can recognise the places, and we're talking about ourselves, and that's great.  

22:25 Host, Loh Chin Ee 

Shannon reminds us that picture books can be a cherished gift for our children, even when they become adults.  

22:33 Shannon Ong 

Many years ago, I met a very young customer who came to the store, and he was like recalling the good memories he had with his parents when they were younger, the parents brought him to the bookstore. I think that guy was probably in his 20s or 30s, so he said, I missed those books that my parents bought for me and read to me and all those things. Then he say, but over the time, you know, because we moved how we have to throw a lot of things and books. So these are the memories that we inevitably we actually have to forego, yeah, as life goes on and changes and all those, if parents. I mean, think...I am a parent too. So it's like, you know, if you want to think from that perspective, if you can keep a book or two that you know your child cherish so much till they go now, I think that is a best gift that you can give them. It holds a lot of memories. Yeah, I guess that is one thing that books, physical books, can do, is the connection between you and your loved ones, whether with your family or children. Yeah. 

23:39 Host, Loh Chin Ee 

Peter Rabbit carefully puts all his delicious easter eggs into his basket to take home and share with his family. What a good little Easter Bunny.  

Thank you for listening to the How We Read podcast episode on children’s picture books. 

This episode was written and hosted by me, Loh Chin Ee, and my thanks go Shannon, Alan, Hong Shin and Myra for their contributions. This episode was produced by Kenn Delbridge of Splice Studios, and Koh Yu Qun provided administrative support. Funding for series 2 was provided by the Singapore Book Council. 

Swipe on the cover art to see show notes with links and references.  

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