To kick off the New Year I invited picture book author and puzzle mistress Doris Fisher to write a guest post, and she has chosen to talk about humor - which we all know is the best way to engage readers, especially beginning readers - most especially when those books attempt to teach concepts, which as you can see is Doris's special gift.
I love humor in picture books for beginning readers.
Learning to read is hard work. There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet to
recognize. And each one makes a different sound when
pronounced. On top of that there are five vowels that each has a long and short
sound.
Now throw in punctuation marks to know…periods, commas, colons,
apostrophes, question marks and exclamation marks! Not to mention the dreaded semi-colon
that stops readers in their tracks, scratching their heads. What the heck does
that dot and comma mean? Really, it should be outlawed. Just create two
sentences.
Humor encourages the new reader and promises a few laughs along
the way. Like Mary Poppins sang, “Just a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine
go down.” If I can amuse a child and sneak in a bit of information in the text,
I think my writing is worthwhile. In Happy
Birthday to Whooo??? the animal birth announcements I created relay all kinds
of details about baby animals, each written with a touch of wordplay to attract
the reader. 
Likewise I call my other three picture books, math with a
laugh. One Odd Day, My Even Day, and My Half Day all
introduce number concepts, but in a way that engrosses the reader. Along with
great illustrations by Karen Lee, these books contain a “seek and find” element
for the number concept detailed in each book.
A puzzle creator to the max, my word puzzles, mazes and codes also contain humor,
tongue-in cheek references and funny clip art to decorate the pages. I was
fortunate enough to speak about creating work for magazines at the Brazos
Valley SCBWI Conference in November. I had a great time remembering all my
magazine articles and puzzles to include in a power point presentation.
My website has puzzles on it to print and solve. And I
always have a monthly book giveaway on my website. So click on over, enter and
become a winner of one of my books in paperback. And remember, laughter is the
best medicine, so they say.
Doris Fisher
www.abcdoris.com
4 comments:
Awesome post and something to remember even for us novelists. I love humor in books -- we need to be able to laugh no matter what our age! Thanks for sharing Doris & Janet!!
I have to admit, I may never figure out the semicolon. Great post, y'all.
Thanks for coming by, Christina and Dotti. I miss all my Houston friends!
One can forget all that is necessary to learn how to just READ. Thanks, Doris for the reminder. We have read, re-read and now lister to our little readers sharing your books with their friends. Sweet and fun times shared around a good book.
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