The Graphic Alphabet

The Graphic Alphabet, by David Pelletier

This week, I wanted to read some books that either were similar in the actual story aspect, or in the title as well, and compare them. I chose to read this one and compare it to a book that I will discuss in a different post about the book The Z Was Zapped by Chris Van Allsburg. I wanted to see how the authors in these books taught or represented the concept of the alphabet in each of their books. This author did something kind of cool; since he is a graphic designer, he had a typed word at the bottom corner of ever picture that began with the letter of the alphabet that went with that page. In some pictures, the letter that was the focus was obvious to find, however on other pages the letter was difficult to locate in the pictures. I think that this is a REALLY cool book, especially in terms of what he did with the letters in the pictures to still show the actual letter itself. I think that a cool thing to do with this book would be covering up the words in the corners and having students try to guess what letter of the alphabet was on that page. This would be a good activity for younger children to review the entire alphabet after they learned it throughout the year. It's definitely a cool book, and a little different than The Z Was Zapped, in that the letters have different actions placed upon them while they are on a stage. Both books teach the alphabet in different but similar ways, and also teach different aspects of language. This book, The Graphic Alphabet, taught simple words that start with each letter of the alphabet, whereas The Z Was Zapped taught basic alliteration and verb usage.