Communicating Facts and Concepts by Sue Grabham
In today’s guest blog, Sue Grabham, publisher of Weldon Owen Children’s Books has written about communicating facts and the use of visuals for National Non-fiction November.
At Weldon Owen Children’s Books, we create highly illustrated, child-centred books for 3 to 12 year olds covering a myriad of topics from nature, science and history to art, fantasy and mental wellbeing.
In each book we aim to take our readers on a journey of discovery, embracing the power of words, pictures and activities to both learn and develop a life-long love of learning. Our books recognise that children absorb ideas in a variety of ways, and that illustrations are an intrinsic part of communicating information. We aim to make complicated subjects easy to understand, activities fun and straightforward, and narratives rich and relevant.
But before we can do that, we need to think about where the child starts from when they open one of our books.
Children access facts, concepts and ideas in numerous ways through a variety of mediums, and are all at different levels.
Some children like to look at pictures, others like to read a lot of words, some would rather make something, or just find their favourite dinosaur or dragon. Some like to read a book from cover to cover, others like to dip in. Some have quite a good understanding of a topic, and others are just ‘at the beginning’ of finding out about it.
The books that we make address all of these things. We use editorial and design techniques to navigate the reader through the information, allowing them to each use their preferred way of accessing content. We also structure the book so that there is a build-up of understanding, with everything pertinent covered and explained – whilst at the same time making it dip-in-able, so that each page works discreetly.
PICTURES
We recognise that a lot of children are very visual, so our books have a lot of pictures. Illustrations can also make a topic seem more approachable, fun and less complicated.
This is especially important for some of the more difficult and potentially ‘scary’ subjects that we are working on at the moment, such as Climate Change and Water Scarcity. We deliberately commission ‘picture-book’ style illustrations so that children are not intimidated and find the pages easy and interesting to look at.
Illustrations can instantly make a topic more fun.
In this page from Mind Mappers Are we running out of water? – aimed at 8-12 year olds, we are explaining that water is recycled again and again. Children love to see the picture of a dinosaur and then a sabre-tooth tiger, Queen Nefertiti, Genghis Khan, Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, Nelson Mandela and Greta Thunberg, and learn that they could have all quite possibly drunk exactly the same drop of water at different times in history as it’s gone around and around the water cycle.
Apart from enabling us to give an instant message, illustrations allow us to ‘play’ with an idea. This is a page from a book we created called The Extraordinary Book that Makes You Feel Happy for children age 6 and up. It is about seeing things from different perspectives.
We want to get across that there is often more than one way to see things, and use an optical illusion to demonstrate the point. You might see a rabbit. But could equally see a duck!
When we design a page, we try to make sure that the pictures speak for themselves, and don’t actually need words to work as a starting point.
This artwork is from a page of our book Mind Mappers – How do you stop climate change? You can see at a glance that it is a page about deforestation – one side of the spread shows a healthy, photosynthesising, biodiverse forest, while the other side is a forest on fire with animals running away and soil erosion.
But the thing about pictures is that it’s easy to look at them very quickly without absorbing the detail. Some children (and adults) will literally flick through a book, soaking up the visual feast of colours, cute animals and curious objects, and that is that. In an information book, we want to slow that process down, and you can do that with words.
WORDS
Look at the deforestation spread again – now with captions, labels and text features included.
The words help you to look in more detail and you are likely to take longer to examine and get involved in the spread.
PICTURES AND WORDS working together
When we plan a page, we structure it so that the words and pictures work hand in hand. The picture gives you some information instantly. The captions support and explain that information, compelling you to look at the picture more carefully and perhaps then reading that information again to let it sink in.
We make sure that the pages are ‘dip in’ or discrete. You can open any page at any time and a caption and a picture will make sense all on its own. This doesn’t stop you from reading the book from cover to cover – editorially there is a slow build-up of ideas. But children can come to the book in their own way at their own level – using either the words or the pictures as a starting point. The texts are levelled, too, so that a less confident reader can just look at the pictures and the labels to engage with the information. A more confident and keen reader can get deeper into the information just as the captions and introductory texts do.
TOOLS
We also use tools to help the reader navigate their way through the books. In our Mind Mappers series, for example, we base the whole book on a mind map (or spider diagram) where complicated ideas are broken down into a clear flow of visual information. The mind map connects the information, making it easier to grasp.
Each chapter uses a part of the mind map to define terms and break down the information. When we look at the chapter opener for ‘What causes climate change?’ – we can see instantly that there are two main drivers – natural causes and human activity. Little pictures identify the component parts (in the case of human activity- carbon increase by burning fossil fuels, deforestation and farming) and we are careful to acknowledge natural reasons for the climate to change slowly whilst pointing out that it is human activity that is causing rapid change.
ACTIVITIES
Many of our books include activities, projects and experiments, too. This is because children also learn through kinesthetics, or the process of ‘doing’.
But I think we might need a whole new BLOG to look at that…
Sue Grabham
Publisher, Weldon Owen Children’s Books
