Enjoying picture books with peers and adults can teach children a lot about the skill of problem solving, as Catherine Cawthorne explains…
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?
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 then 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 experienced some kind of peril, but she didn’t have the skill to solve the problem.
Let’s think about the basic structure of most stories:
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:
These stories would fall absolutely flat without a problem to solve! Imagine Supertato capturing the Evil Pea straightaway and returning him to the freezer before he could do any mischief. Or the little girl in Dogger happily returning him to Dave once she’d realised the mix-up.
We need the horror of everything going wrong, then the satisfaction of everything turning right at the end. So the narrative structure of a picture book is a lesson in creativity. It takes a new idea, a new situation, a new character, then creates a problem for that character, and then solves it.
If we want children to be creative thinkers, not just in their writing but in their approach to life, then picture books provide a wonderful tool for learning those skills.
Having talked about a standard story structure, it’s always fun to break the rules! So in my new picture book with Mike Byrne, Oh No, Flo!, the story structure doesn’t quite follow the norm, because the problem-solver makes things a whole lot worse:
So in this story, our main problemsolver is bad at solving problems, and is completely unaware of her own mistakes. The humour lies in young children knowing more than Flo, and seeing how everything is going wrong.
This also gives young children a rare feeling of confidence and empowerment because they, for once, know more than someone else. (The same feeling you get when you shout “It’s behind you!” at the panto.) We only get a resolution when Farmer gets out of bed and takes charge again.
There is a huge body of evidence that shared reading in the early years is massively beneficial emotionally, socially and cognitively for young children.
I believe it’s also a golden opportunity for us to encourage creative thinking. Next time you read a picture book out loud, try getting the children to think about the main character’s problem.
How else could they use their problem solving skills? What other things might work? I am sure they will come up with some highly inventive alternatives.
Catherine Cawthorne is an author and former speech and language therapist. She wrote Oh No, Flo! (Templar Books).
