Picture Books

It is difficult to convey the exuberance that I observed in my son’s expression upon his first encounter with a live bull. Most children are delighted to learn animal sounds with the aid of picture book with a farm; and this makes sense that they would want to learn and have the mere aptitude to learn animal sounds, or onomatopoeias, before learning actual words. One must learn sounds, or phonemes, before words. One must learn words before learning logic - but more on that for another time. It is the epiphany of the realization that more animals than simply dogs inhabit the real world that children have upon their first encounter with farm animals that I want to focus. It is interesting to note that most children more than 100 years ago would have heard and seen actual farm animals from their first week on earth, so seeing one when they knew what to call it 18 months later was no massive surprise. However, most children today do not grow up on farms, and possibly not even with a pet dog or cat. Therefore, seeing an animal such as a bull or horse is a massive surprise indeed! Though, it seems the surprise is not so much in the fact that a living creature exists that is so large, but rather that the creature itself is living, or exists at all. The child sees it in a book, perhaps alongside dragons and robots and pirates in other books and possibly assumes no creature like that really exists. And yet, when encountering it in the real world, it is more thrilling than mere fascination as they conclude something to the effect of “the picture book characters really are real!” We were meant to do the same with story book characters like Aslan of Narnia - his character really does exist, and is even better than the story book.

P.S. Robots and pirates really are real…and I believe dragons were too, we just like to call them dinosaurs now!