Mercer Mayer Review: A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog
Mercer Mayer Review
The Mercer Mayer series of books are wonderfully useful language teaching tools.
The Boy, a Dog, and a Frog is a wordless picture book, and like the rest of the series the narrative is driven by highly evocative black and white illustrations. The book has no text. And it is the absence of text which is its chief advantage. Shared book reading is a very active process on the part of a child. It is not a passive exercise whereby children sit back and are simply read the text. The pictures themselves require active engagement by the reader. Each illustration features the boy performing a number of actions, both voluntary and sometimes involuntarily, in his efforts to catch a pond-dwelling frog. The boy's and the frog's actions are always clear. This is because Mercer Mayer makes excellent use of facial expression to communicate emotion. Mayer also uses the environment to great advantage. The setting is ingeniously established from several different points of view. Consequently, as readers we always have a sense of scale and the relative positions of the characters. For instance, in one illustration the boy stands in the water looking directly at the frog. As the reader we look over the agitated boy's shoulder, who glares in annoyance at the frog. The frog sits amiably on a log that juts from the water and calmly looks back at the boy. On the following page the author presents a real treat, if you look for it. He shows the exact same scene, but this time we look over the frog's shoulder, back at the boy. In those two juxtaposed illustrations the author establishes the mood of the two protagonists, and where they are in relation to their surroundings, and to each other. It's a simple but brilliant trick that would be incredibly difficult to describe with text alone. It's a literal endorsement of the truism that a picture tells a thousand words. Mercer Mayer Review cont...
The Boy, a Dog, and a Frog features many such clever illustrations. There is really no limit to the amount of questions, both literal and inferred, that can be generated from the story. In fact I have derived many language learning goals from the A Boy and a Frog books. They are a firm favorite of mine. I use them daily with very young children with language impairment. Return from Mercer Mayer Review to 1st Grade Books
|
