By Stacey Kratz
If you want to help a child read, handing them a book with no words might seem odd. But if you want to help a child make meaning, understand and construct narratives, use reasoning, build concentration, and get in touch with their feelings, wordless books are a powerful tool.
In fact, when paired with “silent orchestration,” a technique published this year by three McKay School professors, wordless picture books—or “picturebooks,” as they are called in academic literature in a nod to the pictures’ importance—are more than up to the job. They can also build a love of books, art, and reading in students of all ages.
Silent orchestration started with Terry Young, a longtime judge for various book awards, including the prestigious John Newbery Medal, given annually to the author of “the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children” by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association. As a fan of children’s literature, Young loved wordless picture books and often shared them with children in his life—and his wife, Christine, an experienced elementary school teacher, noticed.
“When I would share wordless picture books, I always created a narrative and shared it with the kids,” Young said. “[Christine] would see how I shared them with my grandkids, and she eventually told me how she shared those kinds of books in her kindergarten classroom. I was intrigued with what she was doing, and that’s where the whole idea of the silent orchestration came from.”
Young, who retired in 2023, mentioned to colleagues Paul Ricks and Lynne Watanabe Kganetso that Christine, in her elementary school classroom, was gathering students with a wordless picture book, silently prompting their experience of the book through gestures, and allowing plenty of time for exploration of the book and its story.
Christine Young’s technique—wordlessly guiding students through a wordless book—ignited the professors’ imaginations, Kganetso said. “We started talking through What would that look like? How would that work? How would we explain it to teachers? How would we get them to take this up? That’s kind of how it evolved.”
Kganetso, Ricks, and Young described silent orchestration and its potential to improve students’ literacy experiences in “Sounds of Silence: Sharing Wordless Picturebooks in the Classroom,” an article in the July/August 2024 issue of The Reading Teacher, a journal of the International Literacy Association.
“We see using wordless picture books as an opportunity to foster literacy learning and a love for reading for each individual child,” the authors wrote, adding that although no words are exchanged, teachers use gestures to pause and start students, to encourage them to make predictions, and to prompt them to search their feelings, make connections, and consider what is happening in a story and what might happen next.
The authors note that this is a major step beyond more usual “limited” uses of wordless books, which are typically used as writing prompts or access points for emerging readers. Kganetso, Ricks, and Young contend that these uses “may overlook the unique potential of wordless picturebooks” in using critical thinking skills to analyze a book, engaging in higher-order cognitive processes, and providing “place and space for the personal, private transactions that can occur within the classroom community.”
More deliberate use of wordless books can open up a child’s inner life, often a challenge in instruction that focuses on what students extract and retain from a book. While students do extract information from wordless books, experiencing them through silent orchestration also allows students to fully explore their “private feelings, attitudes, sensations, and ideas.”
Even well-designed reading instruction tends to discourage students’ emotional responses to books, due to the public nature of that type of teaching and its focus on decoding and explaining words. Young noted that one widely used exercise, “round-robin reading,” involves having students in turn read one paragraph of a text. “Kids will count up to figure out what their paragraph is and practice reading it silently until it’s their turn, and they have no clue what else is going on,” he said.
Far too many curriculums overemphasize skill acquisition, Ricks added. “We’re old enough to have seen pendulums go back and forth in teaching,” he said. “And one of the pendulums that people have gone pretty far away from is acquiring a love of reading or having a pleasurable, deeply emotional experience in literature. Now it’s more like sharing a micro paragraph, asking, ‘Can you say it back to me? What are the key details?’
“We’re teaching everybody the equivalent of scales and arpeggios, and fewer students are just listening to symphonies and concerts,” he said. “But for a long time before you can make music, you can be an appreciator of music. You can be a born appreciator of music, just as you can be a born appreciator of stories.”
Even nonreaders—or reluctant readers or students still learning English—can learn to love the reading process through wordless books, Young said. In the paper, the authors write that silent orchestration is the key that unlocks this more personal, affirming experience for students. As with all fruitful educational techniques, the process requires careful preparation by teachers—looking over the book, spotting things students might miss, practicing silent guidance as well as engaging in the guided exploration and providing time afterward for students to revisit parts of the book they liked, to enjoy details they missed initially, and to talk together about their experiences.
The authors found that one benefit of silent orchestration is students are likely to share feelings they had while experiencing the book, reinforcing the idea that personal experiences with whole texts are valuable to building a love of reading.
“By privileging the personal and private responses, . . . students take responsibility for making sense out of text and images,” the authors write. “Thus, they have gained confidence in their abilities to comprehend and respond to a variety of text types. Moreover, they have learned to value the interpretations of their peers. They have developed the literary language and skills to hold literate conversations about books.”
Young said silent orchestration is a natural fit in classrooms for young children, and it offers similar benefits for older children through wordless texts carefully chosen for their age and maturity levels.
“Not all students have read a lot, and for those who aren’t really avid readers, their ways of responding are limited to making connections to their own experiences,” he said. “But other students are making connections to their experiences and to other things they’ve read. For those who haven’t read that much, it’s more difficult for them to connect to the stories that they’re reading.
“In a wordless book, focusing on the illustrations frees up a lot of imagination and a lot of space for thinking more divergently than they would have if they had the text there.”
Ricks noted that children who are advanced readers often race through words in a book, mistaking fluency—or finishing a book quickly—for understanding. “How do we get them to kind of slow down and care what’s happening?” he said. “Wordless books can be an entry point.”
The more deliberate process of silent orchestration—examining a book’s cover, its endpapers, and each page with careful deliberation—jump-starts students’ meaning-making skills, Kganetso added. “Meaning doesn’t just reside in text, right? It’s this interactive process of experiencing the whole book.”
She said the technique also helps teachers take themselves out of the literacy-building process and center the individual learning of each student.
“Sometimes teachers think about their students as ‘a class,’ as if it’s one thing,” she said. “We wanted them to think about each child as having their own personal interactions with the book and the visuals, making that meaning for themselves. An important piece of it is that we can all have our own personal, aesthetic experience.”
Picture Perfect: Wordless Books to Try
I Walk with Vanessa: A Story About a Simple Act of Kindness by Kerascoët (Random House, 2018); preschool–grade 3, themes of bullying and bystanders
Journey by Aaron Becker (Candlewick, 2013); preschool–grade 3, themes of fantasy and imagined worlds
I Forgive Alex: A Simple Story About Understanding by Kerascoët (Random House, 2022); preschool–grade 3, themes of forgiveness
Inside Outside by Anne-Margot Ramstein and Matthias Arégui (Candlewick Studio, 2019); preschool–grade 5, themes of opposites and perspectives
Unspoken: A Story from the Underground Railroad by Henry Cole (Scholastic Press, 2012); grades K–5, themes of slavery and seeking freedom
Home in a Lunchbox by Cherry Mo (Penguin Workshop, 2024); grades 2–5, themes of immigration, memories, and finding comfort amid change
Viewfinder by Christine D. U. Chang and Salwa Majoka (Tundra Books, 2024); grades 2–5, themes of environmental stewardship, loss, curiosity, and adventure
Yellow Butterfly: A Story from Ukraine by Oleksandr Shatokhin (Red Comet Press, 2023); grades 2–6, themes of war and endurance
Small Things by Mel Tregonning with Shaun Tan (Pajama Press, 2018); grades 3–6, themes of anxiety and decision-making