The impulse small children have towards creating pictures and stories lies at the center of several new children’s books reviewed by Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, in a story entitled “Drawn Out” in the August 23rd edition of The New York Times.
I Gotta Draw, by Bruce Degen, and Dog Loves Drawing by Louise Yates deal with the visual side of children’s imagination, while Rocket Writes a Story by Tad Hills deals with the written word, with all featuring canine protagonists as they go about letting their imaginations run free, even if it causes them trouble.
Spitz praised all three stories in her review, writing that the books “by example and by counsel, empower young children to engage their fertile imaginations: to mark, to match, to make and to record — to become ever more active constructors of their own inner and outer worlds.”