by Roger Sutton
That, in fact, printed words say something worth pursuing. Easy readers offer children their first crack at seeing — for themselves — how words add up. It’s a discovery that goes hand in hand with reading independence: the child, him- or herself, gets to bring the words to life. Books become literally useful. In chapters three and four we look at easy readers and chapter books, those distinct but related genres that don’t teach so much as encourage childen to string words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, chapters into books. And atop the row of beloved picture books, a new bookshelf comes to life, composed of choices made by an ever more actively independent reader.
Easy readers build on the foundations (established at home and school) of phonics, word recognition, and aural experience with stories. They allow children to take charge of their own literacy, permitting them to independently enter the world of a whole story with a beginning, middle, and end. A whole book, too, one with a first page, a last page, chapters, and just enough pictures to help you along without making you feel like a baby. When in my thirties I took up running, it was very important to me to be able to run one mile. The friend who was coaching me showed me a path and two landmarks, a beginning and an end, with exactly one mile between them. Although my first mile probably took me fifteen minutes, the time didn’t matter so much as reaching the end. Reading “a whole book” has the same satisfaction for the new reader. And I wish it were a Law of Publishing that all easy readers have page numbers at the bottom of each page. It lets you know in a very concrete way how far you’ve come and how far you’ve got to go.
The impetus and format for easy readers came from the old Dick and Jane–style primers, which had been using simple vocabulary, word repetition, and generously leaded and illustrated pages to teach reading since the 1930s. But it was in 1957 that the beginning-reader genre became blessed with genius. Two publishing imprints expressly designed to bring primers into the home began that year, Harper & Row’s I Can Read Books, inaugurated by Else Holmelund Minarik and Maurice Sendak’s Little Bear, and Random House’s Beginner Books, with Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat.
The books could not be more different. The Seuss is all anarchy, the Minarik/Sendak all comfort. But they both ask the same questions: How will I get on without my parents? What can I do by myself? Am I brave? They each trace the path of a young character from dependency to self-reliance and back, but re-made (a journey you’ll remember from Where the Wild Things Are), mirroring the experience of learning to read itself. The acquisition of reading skill and fluency is not, and should not, be ever-forward: not every book should be more difficult than the one that’s read before. Again: is that the way you read?
The Cat in the Hat takes its journey to reading on a road of rhyme, a powerful mnemonic device that Mother Goose knew well. It’s a good form for beginning readers, allowing them to use their ears as well as their eyes to figure out what word will come next:
Then those Things ran about
With big bumps, jumps and kicks
And with hops and big thumps
And all kinds of bad . . .
Only one word can finish off that quatrain, and it’s an attractively semi-naughty one, too. Reading has rewards.
The success of Dr. Seuss’s books has inspired a raft of imitators, but they mostly miss what makes him so good. Rhyme by itself is not enough, and wedding it to treacly morals or facts about the states is worse. The Cat in the Hat demonstrates respect for children by allowing them to face down chaos — whether it’s that of a messed-up house or the jumble of letters on a printed page — on their own. It prompts the decoding of words for the sake of fun, not in service of a lesson or didactic point. It is astonishingly disrespectful, and in the end invites readers to join in the rebellion when Mother comes home:
Should we tell her about it?
Now, what SHOULD we do?
Well . . .
What would YOU do
If your mother asked YOU?
Reading as conspiracy. You gotta love it.
Little Bear is altogether a gentler affair, if far more sophisticated in its understanding of young children and of the components that make up a “real” book — like a table-of-contents page, with four chapters listed. Unlike in The Cat in the Hat, Little Bear’s mother is much in evidence here, ever-encouraging in her son’s attempts to make his own way. In the first chapter, Mother Bear patiently outfits Little Bear to play in the snow, giving him garment after garment until he realizes that his own fur coat is enough. Later, she gently points out that he might not be able to fly to the moon:
“Maybe,” said Little Bear.
“But I’m going now.
Just look for me up in the sky.”
Wisely, she lets him go: “‘Be back for lunch,’ said Mother.” Little Bear is both a stand-in for young readers and a figure toward whom they can have some superiority; like Mother, they know Little Bear doesn’t really go to the moon. See? Reading does make you smarter. Kids spend so much time perplexed by the adult world around them that the opportunity to feel smarter than someone else is a real attraction — another classic easy-to-read series that understands this is Peggy Parish’s Amelia Bedelia, in which the title character takes everything literally: when she’s told to trim the Christmas tree, she cuts off the branches. (Not to sound brutal about it, but learning to read is a kind of mastery, and it’s no mistake that Amelia Bedelia is a maid.)
Such wordplay can be tricky for new readers; some, for example, will simply think that Amelia Bedelia is just being goofy. Shelley Moore Thomas and Jennifer Plecas’s Good Night, Good Knight introduces one simple homophone, as the good knight makes sure that three needy little dragons each have a good night. That single tricky bit will be plenty for some readers, but the book also offers something irresistible to all children mature enough to be reading on their own: the opportunity to identify with the grown-up in a story, letting somebody else be the baby for a change.
Where The Cat in the Hat uses rhyme to clue readers in to meaning, Little Bear uses repetition:
Little Bear climbed to the top of a little hill,
And climbed to the top of a little tree,
A very little tree on the little hill,
And shut his eyes and jumped.
Notice how the last line both avoids the repeated littles, trees, and hills and pops with an emphatic rhythm of its own. That’s the jump new readers are making, too, moving from what they know to what they don’t — eyes open, of course.
Typically, easy readers move away from the adult-child dyad toward a world in which the hero is an independent participant in a world of equals, whether they be siblings, friends (see Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad series, or Edward and James Marshall’s Fox books) or a “companion animal” (surely Cynthia Rylant’s Mudge, from her Henry and Mudge books, is too simpatico — and too big — to be just a pet!). As these titles suggest, easy readers often develop into series, for excellent reasons. Kids love seeing what familiar characters get up to next (admit it: so do you), and for new readers, having the characters already in place is one hurdle crossed before a book is even opened.
Fiction is the mainstay of the genre, because it allows children to use the knowledge of story structure gained from listening to help them with a printed text. But there is a smattering of nonfiction. Charlotte Lewis Brown and Phil Wilson’s The Day the Dinosaurs Died indulges a child’s taste for the ghoulish (“Tyrannosaurus rex walked over to the dead Edmontosaurus, and he ripped out a large bite”) while offering scientific speculation about how dinosaurs became extinct. Gentler children might prefer one of Lee Bennett Hopkins’s many excellent poetry collections, such as Small Talk: A Book of Short Poems, with poems like Rebecca Kai Dotlich’s “Fossil Finds”:
No skin,
no scale,
no ancient moan —
his legacy is strictly
BONE.
But a kid ready for easy readers is also ready to read everywhere
— from his or her old picture books, a sentence or two from whatever Mom or Dad is reading, advertisements, cereal boxes, labels . . . you get the idea. What the easy reader provides is a neatly shaped experience maximized for pleasure and success. It helps you learn the happiness not just of reading, but of finishing.
But you’ll notice that publishers don’t miss a trick, using the series appeal and the easy-reader design to format books so that they look like easy readers but really aren’t. And on a recent visit to a bookstore we noticed that some easy-reader series positively bristle with allegedly educational labels that indicate that Little Bear, for example, is a “level one” book for “beginning reading” while Frog and Toad is a level two, “reading with help.” What’s the difference? Got me. The point is that children ready to read on their own are also ready to choose their own books. Let ’em at it.
My oldest child, a daughter, remembers that when she was three, and we lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she often walked with me to a nearby grocery store. She tells me that there were letters painted in the street at the corner where we stopped and waited for the light to change. I have no memory of them. But she tells me that I pointed the two Os out to her. I told her they were like eyes, she says, and that because of those O-eyes she could remember that the word in the street was LOOK.
Then — a miracle! — one evening she glanced at the print in a picture book I was reading to her (who knows which one? We had so many) and happened upon the same word. She saw it on the page, looked up at me, saw that I was reading the print, heard me say the word look — and made the magical connection in her mind that propelled her, like a little tow-headed rocket, into reading.
Forty-five years later, I live again near that same street corner. The letters are no longer there, though I believe my daughter that they once were. I never walk past that corner without thinking how private, powerful, and memorable a moment it is, in the life of a child, when the shape of letters takes on meaning and a door of the world opens.
MORE GREAT EASY READERS
Tedd Arnold, Hooray for Fly Guy!
32 pp. Grades PS–2. In this entry in the series that began with Hi! Fly Guy, Buzz and his zany pet housefly go out for the football team. Unfortunately for Fly Guy, he’s benched — until his special talents are needed on the field. The text’s short, accessible sentences, supported by colorful cartoon illustrations, provide silly, confidence-building fun for early readers.
Monika Bang-Campbell, illustrations by Molly Bang, Little Rat Makes Music
48 pp. Grades K–3. In eight short chapters, the small, determined heroine of Little Rat Sets Sail and Little Rat Rides takes on a new challenge: violin lessons. The matter-of-fact prose allows the flashes of humor in the story to shine even more brightly, and the deep jewel-tone colors provide a rich counterpart to the homey settings.
Judyann Ackerman Grant, illustrations by Sue Truesdell, Chicken Said, “Cluck!”
32 pp. Grades PS–2. A pesky chicken’s constant dirt-scratching, captured in humorous illustrations, threatens friends Earl and Pearl’s pumpkin-growing project. The book’s carefully accumulating structure, repeated refrain, and controlled yet piquant vocabulary are big pluses for brand-new readers.
Grace Lin, Ling & Ting: Not Exactly the Same!
44 pp. Grades K–2. Six chapters tell brief, humorous stories about twin sisters Ling and Ting. People are always telling them that they’re exactly the same, but readers will get to know the girls by their unique personalities — and Ting’s uneven bangs. The stories are warmly illustrated with Lin’s bold color-saturated art.
Kate McMullan, illustrations by R. W. Alley, Pearl and Wagner: Two Good Friends
48 pp. Grades K–3. Whether they are building disastrous science projects or navigating through hurt feelings, Pearl (a conscientious rabbit) and Wagner (a daydreaming mouse) demonstrate the most enduring qualities of friendship. The illustrations are unusually expressive. Sequels include Pearl and Wagner: Three Secrets and Pearl and Wagner: One Funny Day.
James Proimos, Johnny Mutton, He’s So Him!
42 pp. Grades PS–2. The lovably eccentric sheep (from The Many Adventures of Johnny Mutton) again demonstrates the goofy and sweet-natured qualities that are “so him” in five brief, very funny stories related in comic-strip panels. Sequel: Mutton Soup: More Adventures of Johnny Mutton.
Erica Silverman, illustrations by Betsy Lewin, Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa: Rain or Shine
48 pp. Grades K–3. Cowgirl Kate and cow horse Cocoa have four rainy-day adventures that highlight the close friendship between girl and horse. The watercolor illustrations emphasize the characters’ personalities, while the text is both accessible enough to work as a beginning reader and rich enough to function as a read-aloud story.
Sarah Weeks, illustrations by Jane Manning, Pip Squeak
32 pp. Grades PS–2. Mouse Pip cleans the house in preparation for his friend’s visit: “He mops the steps./He mops the floor./And when he’s done,/he mops some more.” The unforced patterned rhyme provides support for just-beginning readers, and there’s also a plot and characterization, plus a small concluding surprise. The bright primary colors of the illustrations reinforce the jaunty tone.
Mo Willems, Pigs Make Me Sneeze!
56 pp. Grades PS–2. Gloomy elephant Gerald and his upbeat porcine best friend, Piggie, are provided with easy-to-follow stories, uncluttered illustrations, and pithy dialogue in the popular Elephant & Piggie series. Willems conveys volumes with an expertly placed eyebrow or down-turned mouth; the color-coded speech balloons suggest shared-reading opportunities for pals of any age or disposition. Other titles include Are You Ready to Play Outside? and I Am Invited to a Party!
The line between easy readers and chapter books is elastic — a salutary reminder that the distinctions between all age- or level-based genres are just so. Marshall’s easy reader Fox and His Friends has chapters; so does Moby-Dick. One of the characteristics of children’s literature, from board books to young adult novels, is that readers are always receiving help. Books for young children have pictures because children can understand pictures before they can understand words. Easy readers tend to restrict themselves to short words that children have already learned, or ones that they can figure out based on the ones they know. In their turn, chapter books — by which, let’s agree, we mean in this context first chapter books — honor a child’s ambition to grow. The help offered by the pictures, generous leading, and limited vocabulary of an easy reader becomes another degree less obtrusive (hopefully). Pictures become fewer, and more decorative than helpful. Sentences and chapters become longer. Animal stand-ins become real kids, usually exact contemporaries of the intended readers. Situations become stories, characterization more complex and differentiated, conflict more complicated.
As publishers have become more and more interested in slicing their lists — and targeting their readers — into increasingly narrower markets, chapter books have reached younger and become thinner. Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books, for instance, used to be the exact example (and pinnacle) of the genre, but they now speak to the higher end of the range and are usually considered simply as realistic fiction for children. More typical of what we think of today as chapter books would be Stephanie Greene’s books about Owen Foote, a boy who goes from second to third grade in the course of the series, growing along with his readers. Each of the six books about Owen is just under a hundred pages, with one or two illustrations per ten-page-or-so chapter.
While chapter divisions are used to make a statement in easy readers, in chapter books they become truly deserving of the name. Easy readers tend to be episodic — you can often read the chapters in any order — but chapter books more often extend a single, and relatively simple, plot over the length of a book. In chapter one of Owen Foote, Frontiersman, Owen and his best friend, Joseph, visit the fort they have constructed in a neighbor’s backyard. In chapter two, they go back to it and find strangers therein. That’s a plot. It’s quite brill
iantly done by the author, who first brings us into immediate empathy with the hero, then throws some trouble in his direction. Most crucially, Greene has Owen solve the problem without the aid of grown-ups, here represented as obstacles:
“I know my mom,” Owen said. “She’ll say we should talk about it. She thinks talking solves everything. And you saw those guys, Joseph. They don’t want to talk. They’re jerks.”
Now, if parents were in charge of this book, Owen would see the error of his ways and talk to his mother, who would offer a sensible, gentle solution to the problem of big boys wrecking your fort. But even though Greene has Owen’s mother do just that, Owen and Joseph know they are on their own to scare the boys away. Which they do. (I’m reminded of the advice YA writer Bruce Brooks once gave about bullies: “Punch them in the nose.”)
Owen Foote is just one of several first-rate chapter book series about boy life; other excellent choices are Jessica Scott Kerrin’s books about Martin Bridge (including Martin Bridge: Ready for Takeoff!), Barbara Seuling’s Robert books (including Robert and the Great Pepperoni), and Johanna Hurwitz’s long-running series about Russell (including Rip-Roaring Russell). Books about boys currently seem to command the largest share of this genre, perhaps because there is more anxiety about creating boy readers in a culture that assumes girls will take care of themselves when it comes to reading. It may also be that boys developmentally need more time with chapter books while girls move “up” faster.
But heroines there are, most excellently, the cranky, bossy Judy Moody. Obstreperous children’s book heroines can have their “feistiness” overplayed, reminding me of something my colleague Deborah Stevenson once wrote in The Horn Book: “Feisty and spunky are two . . . adjectives reserved for the nonthreatening and the totally unserious [characters] who have the nerve to attempt to be fierce in a world that understands they can be nothing of the kind.” But as portrayed in Megan McDonald’s ten-and-counting books about Judy and her younger brother, Stink, Judy is as authentically prickly as the bugs she collects. She’s outspoken, frequently bad-tempered, and very real. She’s a far cry from Barbara Park’s ubiquitous Junie B. Jones, a feisty, cutesy, faux-obstreperous baby-talking first-grader whose chapter books are routinely best sellers. (Nobody ever said kids were born with taste.)