Black & White
A teacher’s look at why this book belongs in the Lap Listeners stage.
Why it fits Lap Listeners (for babies in their first year, when books are about your voice, not the plot)
A wordless accordion of crisp silhouettes to prop beside a baby during tummy time. Hoban's photographic eye gives babies real-world shapes, a quietly Montessori choice. It works before any other book can.
What makes it special
Hoban understood that for a newborn, a crisp silhouette of a bib or a butterfly IS the entertainment. The wordless accordion format stands up beside a baby during tummy time — a book that works without hands. It asks nothing of the exhausted parent and gives the baby exactly what developing vision craves.
About Tana Hoban
Tana Hoban (1917-2006) was an American photographer who built a career in commercial photography, specializing in pictures of children, and taught photography at the University of Pennsylvania from 1966 to 1969. Beginning in 1970, when she was 53, she wrote, designed and photographed more than 110 books for children, many of them wordless, using photographs to teach shapes, colors, numbers and opposites.
Hoban traced her start to a Bank Street School project in which children asked what they had noticed on the way to school could remember nothing, until they were handed cameras and began paying attention. The question she then asked herself was: 'What is there, right there where I'm standing that I'm not seeing?'
Also by this author: Black on White · Of Colors and Things · Shapes, Shapes, Shapes
More from “Touch, Pat, Peek”
This book is part of The Best Books for Babies: 30 Teacher Picks (Lap Listeners) in our guide The Best Children’s Books by Age — 120 books chosen by the Montessori-certified teachers at Creative Minds Montessori in Frisco, TX. Come see how we build readers →
Nobody paid for this review — not the author, not the publisher — and the store link above earns us nothing. Our only interest is the reader this book fits.