The Power of Wordless Picture Books: Helping Students Develop Inferential Thinking Skills

When children are born into the world, they have no sense of written language, they process their world through the visuals around them (Pegado, 2022). When parents may expose their children to a variety of experiences like reading board picture books, taking trips to the grocery store, and watching television, these experiences shape young children’s background knowledge.
The purpose of this paper is to describe wordless picture books (WPB) and how teachers can incorporate them into their instruction to develop students’ visual literacy, background knowledge and critical thinking skills. There are two text examples, “Good Dog, Carl” by Alexandra Day for ages one to kindergarten and “I Got It!” by David Weisner for second to fifth grade students.