Teach-Early-Years-14.1

CATHERINE CAWTHORNE IS AN AUTHOR AND FORMER SPEECH AND LANGUAGE THERAPIST Enjoying picture books with peers and adults can teach children a lot about the skill of problem solving, as Catherine Cawthorne explains… Get creative with shared reading! I guess when most people think about creativity, they think about the arts. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers . Spielberg’s Jaws . And the greatest rock song of all time, Livin’ On A Prayer by Jon Bon Jovi. (This is a hill I am prepared to die on.) The British Psychological Society defines creativity as “the ability to discover new and original ideas, connections, and solutions to problems”. It’s the last bit of that definition, the solutions to problems, that maybe sometimes gets forgotten when we talk about creativity. And I think that we can all agree that finding solutions to problems is a very useful and key life skill! So how can shared reading of picture books help children develop this aspect of creativity? experienced some kind of peril, but she hadn’t really figured out a way to resolve it. WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM? Let’s think about the basic structure of most stories: 1. Introduce a character and a setting 2. That character has a problem (which generally gets worse) 3. The character has to solve or overcome the problem in some way 4. The problem is resolved, everything is back to normal We see this structure in lots of well- known picture books, and children learn to expect that pattern in the stories they hear. Have a look at these two well-loved classics: A LADYBIRD IN PERIL… Recently I came across “The Laideaberd In The Darc”, one of the first picture books that my daughter wrote when she was four or five. The basic plot goes something like this (SPOILER ALERT): A ladybird goes for a walk in the woods. Oh no! She is lost! She runs and runs. She finds her mum. Everything is okay. Obviously this is a brilliant book that is destined to become a literary classic, but if I were to be just a teeny weeny bit picky I might say that it wasn’t an entirely satisfying story arc. My daughter had obviously understood that her story needed a character who 48 Teachearlyyears.com