Yes, Charlotte Died: Using Picturebooks to Talk about, Not Avoid, the Topic of Death

Abstract

AbstractThis article focuses on the difficult event of death. The audience for this article is classroom teachers, librarians/media specialists, curriculum developers, and so on. The purpose is to share points to consider when choosing quality picture books focusing on death as well as exemplars to represent these points. These points were concluded as a result of a multimodal content analysis of 100 picture books. We begin by presenting a rationale for using picture books to help children deal with the difficult topics including the topic of death. Next, we describe why we chose the topic of death. We continue by describing our inquiry and present characteristics of quality picture books that we discovered during our inquiry. For each characteristic we highlight an exemplary picture book to illustrate the characteristic. We end with final thoughts.