DARWINISM FOR BEGINNERS: Picture books that introduce children to evolution • Jonathan Emmett

Until recently, the UK school curriculum did not require children to be taught about evolution until they reached secondary school. In September 2014, after years of lobbying by scientists and other groups, evolution was introduced into the final year (age 10-11) of the primary curriculum. While this is a step in the right direction, research has shown that children are more likely to accept evolution’s rational explanation of creation if they’re introduced to it towards the beginning of their primary education rather than at the end, by which time less-rational explanations (both religious and non-religious) may have taken root.

For the last few years I've been using my poem My Cousin is a Cucumber (from Skyboy and other Stupendous Science Stories) to explain to Year 3 and 4 classes that all life on Earth is believed to have a single common ancestor. Most seven-year-olds are fascinated to learn that they are descended from an "itsy-bitsy blob of life" and amused to discover that they are the distant cousins of both cockatoos and cucumbers. An awareness of evolution is fundamental to a child’s proper understanding of the natural world and, if presented in an appropriate and engaging way, there is no good reason for evolution not to be introduced to children as young as five or six.

Picture books can be a very effective way to introduce evolution to children from an early age. How the Borks Became, my new picture book with Elys Dolan, was written specifically to explain natural selection, the process by which evolution takes place. It was developed in consultation with Boston University’s Child Cognition Lab who have been researching how to teach evolution effectively to young children. As a result of their research, the team developed their own natural selection picture book, How the Piloses Evolved Skinny Noses, which is aimed at a slightly older age group to How the Borks Became and explains the process in a more detailed way. You can find out more about the team’s research and their book at evolvingmindsproject.org.

How the Borks Became follows the evolution of a fictional species, the llama-like Borks, who live on “a far distant planet, quite like our own Earth”. The books shows how three environmental factors - climate, predation and availability of food – result in Borks evolving from smooth-furred, short-necked, blue creatures into shaggy, long-necked, yellow ones.

How the Borks Became shows how natural selection transforms the Borks from smooth-furred, short-necked, blue creatures into shaggy, long-necked, yellow ones.

The use of a fantasy alien ecosystem gives the book licence to represent the process of natural selection in a speeded-up, caricatured form over just four generations of Borks. A page at the end of the book explains that evolution on Earth happens at a far slower rate with much smaller changes and that it might take an Earth animal millions of years to change as much as the Borks in the story.

When a greedy predator gobbles up all of the blue-furred borks, only the better-camouflaged yellow-furred Borks are left to parent the next generation.

Here are five more picture books that do a great job of introducing the fundamentally important topic of evolution to children at primary school age.

Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story 

written by Lisa Westberg Peters

illustrated by Lauren Stringer

Suitable for age 5 and above.

This is a US picture book, but can easily be bought on import. Westberg Peter’s simple, poetic text charts the evolution of humans from our beginnings as simple single-cell organisms to the present day, highlighting significant stages along the way. Stringer’s illustrations intercut pictures of creatures in their natural habitats with images of a family mapping out an evolutionary diagram on a sandy beach. These sand drawings are cleverly employed to illustrate important developments in internal anatomy, such as the appearance of backbones and lungs. A glossary page and timeline at the back of the book give additional details and a sense of perspective to the book’s four billion year narrative.

A spread from Our Family Tree, showing the development of fins and a backbone.

The Story of Life

written by Catherine Barr

and Steve Williams

illustrated by Amy Husband

Suitable for age 6 and above.

This book covers an even longer timeline than Our Family Tree and charts the evolution of all life on Earth with the time period displayed in the corner of each page. Amy Husband’s lively illustrations display the diversity of Earth’s plant and animal life at various stages in its early history, before narrowing the focus to show the last 12 million years of human evolution from the the first apes to modern man on the last four spreads. The book finishes with an environmental message about the need to look after the planet that is our only home.

This spread from The Story of Life illustrates the diversity of life on prehistoric Earth.

What Mr Darwin Saw

by Mick Manning

and Brita Granström

Suitable for age 7 and above.

Although the concept of evolution predated Charles Darwin, it was not widely accepted until Darwin discovered the principle of natural selection. Mick Manning and Brita Granström’s biographical picture book spans the life of this revolutionary scientist, but focusses chiefly on the five years the young Darwin spent as a captain’s companion and naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle. The book uses scenes from the voyage and excerpts from Darwin’s diary to show how his encounters with the plants and animals of South America, and the Galapagos Islands in particular, informed his subsequent work.

What Mr Darwin Saw illustrates how Darwin’s experiences during the voyage of the HMS Beagle informed his later work.

The Misadventures of Charles Darwin

written by Isabel Thomas

illustrated by Pete Williamson

Suitable for age 9 and above.

This book, part of Oxford University Press’s Treetops in Fact series, presents an entertaining biography of Darwin’s life, from “stinky schoolboy” to aged “celebrity scientist”. It also does a great job of explaining Darwin’s theories clearly and succinctly and examines some of their implications for science and culture. Isabel Thomas’s engaging and accessible text is liberally peppered with archive photographs and Pete Williamson’s illustrations and ‘Mythbuster’ panels throughout the book help to correct common misconceptions about Darwin’s life and work.

This spread from The Misadventures of Charles Darwin looks at how Darwin’s theories were initially received.

All About Evolution:

From Darwin to DNA

by Robert Winston

(Previously published as Evolution Revolution)

Suitable for age 10 and above.

This book, written by scientist and broadcaster Robert Winston is crammed with detailed information on every aspect on evolution, from its historical development as an idea to its possible implications for the future of mankind. One minor criticism is that some spreads feel a little too crowded, making it difficult to take in the content, but this is easily forgiven given the breadth and quality of information the book contains. Although this book is probably more suited to secondary school readers, it contents will be of interest to more advanced and inquisitive readers in their final years of primary school as well.

This spread from All About Evolution shows how scientists think complex structures like the human eye evolved via a series of incremental changes.

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How the Borks Became An Adventure in Evolution by Jonathan Emmett and Elys Dolan is published by Otter-Barry Books. Find out more about the book and download some activity sheets here.

Find out more about Jonathan and his books at his Scribble Street web site or his blog. You can also follow Jonathan on Facebook and Twitter @scribblestreet.

See all of Jonathan's posts for Picture Book Den.

TO BOLDY GO: Picture books in space • Jonathan Emmett

As someone who grew up at the time of the Apollo Missions I’ve always found the idea of space travel hugely appealing and had a particular interest in stories that are set in space.

I've pitched several space-set stories to publishers over the years. However, while I’ve had some success getting space-set chapter fiction published …

The Captain Comet chapter fiction books illustrated by Andy Parker are set in space.

… none of the space-set picture books I’ve pitched have ever made it into print.

An art sample by illustrator Steve Cox for Invasion of the Botty Snatchers,
an unpublished space-set picture book we developed together.

Of course this could be because none of them were any good, but when another of my space-set picture book ideas was turned down last year, the publisher told me that one of the reasons was that, “picture books set in space generally don’t sell.”

If this is true, then I think it shows that the picture book market is currently catering to the tastes of a demographic that is relatively narrow compared to its potential readership. There are plenty of picture book age children that are interested in stories set in space. However these children are currently having this appetite fed by TV shows and films rather than books. My son and several of his friends were obsessed with the original U certificate Star Wars trilogy from the age of four and when I went to see the new Star Wars film over Christmas, I was struck by how many parents had brought small children to see it, despite its 12 certificate rating.

If publishers want to show these children that picture books are every bit as capable of matching the appeal of their favourite films and TV shows, they might consider “boldly going” into space a little more often. And I do mean “boldly”; it’s not just the setting that’s important. There is a market for gentler picture book stories set in space, but such books will not cut it with young readers with an appetite for dogfights and death stars. These children need picture books that can match the dastardly villainy, thrillingly perilous predicaments and sophisticated craft and weaponry evident in films like Star Wars.

Here are three space-set books that are a good deal “bolder” than most.

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The King of Space written and Illustrated by Jonny Duddle is one of the best picture books of the last ten years and shamefully under-recognised by reviewers and awards judges alike. It’s a brilliantly illustrated, tech-tastic, action packed epic, filled with battling spaceships, menacing robots and a pint-sized megalomaniac.

The hardback edition comes with a dust-cover that unfolds to make this awesome poster of a 'warbot'.

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Nuts in Space written and illustrated by Elys Dolan is a madcap space epic that's brimful of comic references to both Star Wars and Star Trek. Charged with transporting “The Lost Nuts of Legend” across the galaxy, the crew of Forest Fleet’s finest starship encounter a mischievous menagerie of creatures from little green men to ravenous Ewok-like bears, before falling into the clutches of Daft Monkey and his legion of simian stormtroopers.

The book is full of amusing in-jokes for sci-fi fans young and old, such as this encounter between Daft Monkey and Commander Moose.

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Mungo and the Spiders from Space written by Timothy Knapman, illustrated by Adam Stower is part of an excellent series of Mungo stories in which Mungo, the young hero, enters the world of a favourite bedtime book. In this story it's a comic book adventure featuring a Dan-Dare-like space hero called Captain Galacticus.

Galacticus and Mungo join forces to thwart the villainous, Dr Frankenstinker, the "maddest scientist on Mercury".

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Can you recommend any other picture books that "boldly go" into space? If so, we'd love to hear about them in the comments box below.

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Jonathan Emmett's latest picture book is Fast and Furry Racers: The Silver Serpent Cup illustrated by Ed Eaves and published by Oxford University Press.

Find out more about Jonathan and his books at his Scribble Street web site or his blog. You can also follow Jonathan on Facebook and Twitter @scribblestreet.

See all of Jonathan's posts for Picture Book Den.

Look who’s laughing now - Crossover humour in picture books • Elys Dolan

A big THANK YOU to this month's guest blogger, Elys Dolan, author-illustrator of the very funny Weasels and Nuts in Space. Elys explores how picture book humour can appeal to both young and old in this post.

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I’m a big fan of funny picture books. They’ve brought me moments of hilarity featuring everything from speedo wearing wombats to ugly ducklings that grow up to be even worse looking ducks. I’m so much of a fan I even try to make the odd one myself along with doing a PhD about them. I find such books funny even though I’m apparently a fully paid up grown up with a mortgage, a tax return and a grey hair I found the other day but don’t want to talk about.

So prepare yourself because I’m about to get very nerdy about the kind of picture books that are funny for both children and adults. I’ll be using the term crossover humour to describe it. I’ll wax lyrical about why they are the kind of books I want to make and the implications that come with that.

But before I begin here’s a quick disclaimer:

There are few things more subjective than what is or is not funny. Therefore I can’t guarantee that you won’t think the things I’m purporting to be amusing are quite the opposite. If this happens please accept my apologies and lets hope we never have to sit next to each other on a long plane journey.

There’s many types of humour used in children’s books but I’ve chosen three to use as examples, toilet humour, parody and physical humour, because they illustrate the use of different kinds of humour within the same book to achieve a crossover appeal. These examples are going to come from my own work. The first reason for this is that I’m deeply self-centred. The second is if I were to cover the subject in its entirety, in reference to various picture book makers, you’d be reading this for days and probably run out of food and other essential supplies. Thirdly I can put my own images on the internet without asking for permission and not get into trouble.

Toilet humour

I’ll start with the classiest type of humour. From my experience of doing book events this goes down brilliantly with kids. This vignette from my first book, Weasels, almost always gets a laugh because sometimes all you have to do is show them a toilet:

Having said that I find the grown ups in the audience aren’t above it either. You tend to have to be a bit subtler and let their own dirty imaginations do the work. I’ll often get the odd parent laughing at this bit from Weasels when the lights suddenly go out:

Toilet humour is frequently used in picture books, sometimes lazily and sometimes to great effect. Well know examples include Poo Bum by Stephanie Blake, The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew it Was None of His Business by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch.

Parody

I seem to do this a lot and won’t realise it until half way through development. I’ll think ‘I’m going to do a book set in space’ and some how I end up referencing, and poking fun at, Star Wars, Star Trek, 2001 A Space Odyssey and all the other stuff I’m a fangirl for. This is glaringly obvious in my second book Nuts in Space. Does this place remind you of anything?: 

And perhaps this Moose is a little like William Shatner in his own way:  

And there’s more than a few Bond film references in Weasels including this chap who’s a bit like a certain evil genius/super villain:  

It’s a fairly adult form of humour because it often requires prior knowledge of external references but I get a great reaction from the reader. Parody like this doesn’t seem very common but there are some excellent examples of parody when it come to reworking fairy tales. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith one of my favourite and there’s Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs by Mo Willems.

Physical humour: Slapstick & Humorous Physicality

Under slapstick I’m including all Laurel and Hardy style falling over and comedic accidents. For example:

Electrocution 

Ducks getting sucked into vacuum cleaners

And the classic slipping on a banana skin.

By humorous physicality I mean characters that are funny just from the way they look. I often do this by exaggerating certain features and essentially making them look ridiculous. For example here’s a Baywatch hippo:

I’ve exaggerated the size of said hippo, and trust me it’s no easy thing to make a hippo even chunkier, for comedic value. Putting her in a swimming costume and making her run seems to add to the entertainment too. There’s some great examples of exaggerated characteristics in Melvin Peake’s Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor and in Marc Boutavant’s animal characters from Around the World with Mouk.

I find that physical humour appeal much more to children than adults. I’m not entirely sure why, perhaps it’s slightly too direct for adults, and there are of course exceptions but in my own experience it’s the child that react the most to this.

So of the three forms of humour I’ve described parody appeals most to adults, toilet crosses between ages and slapstick appeals mostly to children.

Why on earth would I use crossover humour? 

I started using crossover humour, and any humour at all for that matter, unconsciously. I didn’t even realise I was doing it until people started telling me. Now the question that looms large for me is why would an author or illustrator include crossover humour in a book for children? I can’t speak for any other practitioners (although I’m planning to glean a range of opinions as part of my research) but I can offer my own philosophy.

I think the initial motivation was my own entertainment. This job is difficult, time consuming, and unlikey to make me rich so I’ve got to be enjoying myself. I do this by putting my own sense of humour into my work and doing things that make me giggle to myself like a crazy lady.

A less self-involved reason is how funny I find the book is a good form of quality control. I sometimes encounter the perception that children have lower standards of humour. I don’t think this is the case. Sometimes different things appeal to children but the standard is always very high and if they’re not enjoying it they will let you know. So, if it’s not good enough to keep me entertained how can I expect my readers to enjoy it?

I’m conscious that my readership isn’t only children. Children’s books are encountered by parents, older ‘reluctant’ readers, booksellers, publishers, other authors & illustrators, reviewers etc. I firmly believe you need to direct the majority of humour towards your core audience but I don’t want the rest to go wanting. If there’s a poor tired parent who’s been asked by their little angel to read one of my books for the 1000th time I hope I can at least raise a brief smile with a gag about death bananas.

Issues with cross over humour: 

I do occasionally meet resistance from my publishers and others in the industry when using this multi-level humour. Weasels went through a number of rejections and a few of them were because the humour was found to be ‘too adult’. I think subsequently crossover humour has been one of my unique selling points as an author and illustrator but I’ll talk about the pitfalls I’ve encountered.

Kids won’t ‘get it’. 

If you’re going to put in jokes for grown ups it may be that not all children will understand them. Children and adults have different frames of reference and a form of humour like parody require knowledge of external context for you to get the joke. The question here is does everyone have to get every joke? I know this can be a controversial view but as long as such jokes aren’t in the majority and they provide a different form of interest too I think it’s okay if they don’t.

For instance, in Nuts in Space there’s this moment:  

Now this requires a certain knowledge of Star Wars to get this joke. It’s fairly safe to assume not all children will have seen Star Wars so they won’t. On another level though I think an evil space monkey having a duel with a Moose using strip lights is a pretty interesting thing on its own. So, if it’s not going to be funny for everyone then at least make it interesting for the others so it works on two levels. I tend to think of the interest as the first level and the added joke as the second level.

The format makes it hard to to get the balance right

I was talking to an editor recently about why there’s more cross over humour in film and tv (think pixar films etc) than kids books and they said it’s perhaps because a picture book is like a haiku. Every word needs to count whereas in a film it’s one of many. Therefore in a picture book it’s much easier to upset the balance because too much of the content operates on the second level, excluding part of your audience. This is certainly a risk for simpler, more linear, picture books though it’s not impossible to achieve cross over humour in this context. Jon Klassen’s I Want my Hat Back has a kind of deadpan humour that appeals to adults whilst successfully telling a tale about a nefariously stolen hat to children. It works on those two levels and it does this consistently throughout the story. This subtle technique is way beyond the likes of me so I approach it in a different way. I work in a detailed, information heavy, manner so I can sneak in the odd moment of second level humour amongst the falling over and fart jokes.

What’s appropriate?

There’s all sorts of theories and differing opinions about what’s appropriate to include in children’s books and this does impact on the kind of humour you can use. For instance some toilet humour could be considered too revolting or some slapstick too violent. I encountered this recently in regards to dog turds. To be precise, this turd here: 

It’s the punchline of a joke which I’m not going to reveal in full because it’ll ruin the ending of my new book The Mystery of the Haunted Farm (yes that was a shameless plug). It seems the British reader has no problems with the odd dog poo but the publisher worried Americans would find this dog turd disgusting instead of funny because they have different standards of what’s acceptable. This lead to months of debate and extensive consultation with an American publisher to decide if dog turds are acceptable punch line for a picture book. Eventually it was decided that the turd could stay but it was a close run thing. I had to remove the blue bottles flying around it though. It’s a hard life.

Using cross over humour can be like walking on a knife edge desperately trying to keep your balance. Despite this it’s the times when I’ve done a reading of one of my books and I’ve got both kids and parents laughing that makes all the fretting, rewrites and frantic colouring in worth it. So if you’ll excuse me I’m off to draw a pig wearing underpants falling down toilet whilst dressed like Darth Vader and do it all over again.

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Elys Dolan's latest picture book Nuts in Space is published by Nosy Crow.

Find out more about Elys and her books at elysdolan.com
You can also follow Elys on twitter @ElysDolan

MARVELLOUS MACHINES: Technology in picture book illustration • Jonathan Emmett

Understanding how it all fits together is no mean feat.
One of David Parkins's techtastic illustrations for Eileen Browne's story, No Problem.

I’m a bit of a technophile and several of my picture books, such as Callum’s Incredible Construction Kit and Tom’s Clockwork Dragon have a technological theme. I’d like to think that my enthusiasm for technology comes across in my writing, but the writing only tells half the story in a picture book, the other half being told by the illustrations.

Some of the fundamentally flawed bicycle
drawings from Rebecca Lawson’s study

To draw a machine or mechanism well, an illustrator has to understand how it’s put together and operates. This cognitive skill doesn’t always go hand in hand with artistic ability and is relatively uncommon, not just among illustrators, but among the population as a whole.

Cognitive psychologist Rebecca Lawson demonstrated this last point with a series of experiments in which subjects were asked to either draw or complete a drawing of a bicycle. The bicycle is a simple machine that most people will have been familiar with from an early age and even non-cyclists encounter them regularly. While many people may think that they understand how a bicycle is put together, Lawson’s experiments (which she later published as a paper) show that relatively few people are able to draw one from memory without making fundamental errors.

Having established how rare this ability is, here are 10 techtastic picture book illustrators who excel at drawing machines.


You can see every nut, bolt and washer in David Parkins’s wonderful illustrations for No Problem, written by Eileen Browne. This book is one of my all-time favourite picture books about technology and was a huge bedtime favourite of my son’s.

The extraordinary Chris Riddell seems to excel at drawing everything and technology is no exception. The robots that inhabit Wendel’s Workshop demonstrate how technically detailed illustrations can also be brimming with character.

Mark Oliver, who created Monster’s - An Owner’s Guide with me, cites his engineer father as an inspiration for much of his work. Mark once told me that the key to illustrating technology well is that, “it has to look like it could actually work.”

Jonny Duddle’s The King of Space is full of superbly drawn spaceships and robots. Rex, the book’s anti-hero, lives on a farm which may be why the huge “warbot” he constructs looks like it’s made from tractor parts.

Ted Dewan’s re-telling of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice replaces magic with technology, and the work-shy human apprentice with an equally work-shy robot.

Although some of Callum’s creations in Callum’s Incredible Construction Kit are huge, Ben Mantle’s brilliantly detailed illustrations make it clear that they are constructed from pieces that a child could handle and assemble on his own.

William Bee’s illustrations for And the Train Goes are packed with the sort of wonderful technical detail that’s rarely found in picture books for the very young.

While cross sections are more commonly found in non-fiction, Steve Cox’s design for the crocodile submarine in our picture book The Treasure of Captain Claw was so stunning that publisher Orchard gave Steve this huge gatefold to show it off. Click here to see a much larger version in Steve's Flickr album.

No list of techtastic illustrators is complete, without the grandaddy of them all, Heath Robinson. This illustration is from Railway Ribaldry, published for the centenary of the Great Western Railway in 1935.

And finally, I couldn’t resist sneaking in an illustration from The Clockwork Dragon (a reworking of Tom’s Clockwork Dragon), my forthcoming picture book with Elys Dolan. Elys is a self-confessed armour nut, and this certainly shows in her splendid illustrations of the eponymous dragon, which is made from recycled arms and armour.

Do you have a favourite picture book featuring marvellous machinery that I haven’t mentioned? If so, tell us about it in the comment box below.

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Jonathan Emmett's next techtastic picture book, The Clockwork Dragon illustrated by Elys Dolan, will be published by Oxford University Press in February 2015.

Find out more about Jonathan and his books at his Scribble Street web site or his blog. You can also follow Jonathan on facebook and twitter @scribblestreet.

See all of Jonathan's posts for Picture Book Den.