He infuses his reading with his personality. It is this ability that is the difference between a good teacher and a teacher who is less than stellar (I don’t like to say “bad teacher” but yeah, that’s what I mean, even if it’s not PC).ī.J. They bring their personae to bear on the lessons they teach. But for now, let’s just say that good teachers are exciting. I have to assume this is a natural and universal desire for most children.Īnother thought I had, as I watched that clip, was about something I think about as the “teacher persona.” One day I will blog about this. I’d want to talk about it and my mother would have to decide whether to break the flow of her reading to allow me the freedom to go off on a tangent or whether to tell me to wait until we read the relevant, accompanying and likely revelatory text.Īs a writer, I am a person in love with sounds and words, and yet as a child, I always wanted to see the pictures.

I would ask her to wait and flip a few pages forward to see the next picture. I know that when I was a child, it was hard to wait for the next page with an illustration, even though my mother served as an adequate bedtime story reader. I mean, if your parent isn’t an exciting reader, what you’ve got left are the illustrations, right? Kids like to look at the pictures The memory would be a good one that in and of itself make a child get completely silly.īut what would happen if the child never heard of the book or the author and a parent lacking histrionic ability read this book to his child for the first time ever? Would the child laugh at the nonsense syllables in spite of a parent’s uninspired reading? Or would he find the experience altogether lacking. Novak made a whole lot of children get totally goofy. For instance, a child might laugh at a parent’s reading of the book because the child remembered the event in school: the time that B.J. Was it the book that generated the children’s laughter? Or was it Novak’s performance? Could an average parent reproduce the experience at home?Įvery question that came to mind raised further questions. Novak reading his book, The Book With No Pictures, to children in grades K-2 at a Long Island charter school. Still, something nagged at me as I watched a clip of B.J. The idea was novel and the kids certainly responded positively.

Or at least it seemed that way to me at first when an article on the subject caught my eye.

The Book With No Pictures is an intriguing name and concept for a children’s book.

The book with no pictures words