This week for Picture Book Idea Month I am continuing to brainstorm possible ideas for homemade big books for baby storytimes. So far I’ve considered ideas for Mother Goose rhymes, circular/sequence stories, and songs and poems. This week I’ve been thinking about question-and-answer books.
Question-and-answer is another type of structure that crops up in the books I use for baby storytime: think about Where’s Spot and Where’s Maisy? and just about every Karen Katz book. I can come up with quite a few ideas for this type of book; the question will be whether I can illustrate them to my satisfaction.
Find the Bugs
Very simple idea: Create a few double-page spreads, and on each page ask, “Can you see the ladybug?” or “Can you see the inchworm?” I’d like to make it a pretty easy search-and-find, so the bugs won’t really be hiding. But if I can put in, say, a red strawberry and a red flower on the same page as the ladybug, and a peapod and a feather on the inchworm page, then we could point to each object and decide if it’s the bug.
Can You See?
I thought of this one for my shapes storytime…the first question would be, “Can you see a sun?” and it would be a round yellow circle. The next page would be a page with the sun in the sky, with a few more details (swirlies and rays) on the yellow circle. “Can you see a triangle?” would go with a green triangle, which on the next page would be a pine tree under the sun. I’d see if I could come up with a couple more pages. Maybe an oval lake?
More! More! More!
What’s your favorite question-and-answer book to share in storytime?
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