Instead of one picture book from my curriculum booklist, Picture Book Preschool, I chose two books to compare and recommend, Pelle’s New Suit by Elsa Beskow and Charlie Needs a Cloak by one of my favorites, Tomie dePaola. Pelle’s New Suit, first published in 1929, is about a “little Swedish boy whose name was Pelle.” Pelle has his own lamb, but needs a new coat. So he shears the lams’s wool, takes it to his grandmother, and asks her to comb the wool. She agrees to do so in return for some help in the garden from Pelle. And so it goes. Each person that Pelle asks for help in making his coat asks him to do something in return. So children learn how a coat is made from raw wool, how work is exchanged for goods, and how one event follows another in a linear story. The original illustrations by Ms. Beskow are beautiful as you can see from the picture. (There’s also a Wonder Books edition with ilustrations by George Wilde, not as great.)

Charlie of Charlie Needs a Cloak makes his own cloak from the wool of his own sheep. However, the illustrations tell a parallel story of Charlie’s naughty little pet lamb who interferes with Charlie’s cloak-making at every step. Then, as the story ends, we see why Charlie needed a new cloak in the first place. Let’s just say that naughty pet lambs are hard on cloaks. The pictures are the salient feature in this book; there’s also a mouse in each picture who’s doing something a bit mischievous, too. Poor Charlie gets his red cloak after some hard work and a few tussles with the lamb, and there’s a short glossary of words in the back of the book to explain exactly what Charlie was doing when he sheared and carded and spun the wool.

Get both of these if you can and read them together. You might appreciate your winter coat a little more the next time you get it out of winter storage.

Picture Book Preschool is a preschool/kindergarten curriculum which consists of a list of picture books to read aloud for each week of the year and a character trait, a memory verse, and activities, all tied to the theme for the week. You can purchase a downloadable version (pdf file) of Picture Book Preschool by Sherry Early at Biblioguides.