I always remember pictures. I sometimes forget words,” says a child of five: something to bear in mind when the National Literacy Strategy is about to embark on a series of conferences on writing and creativity. Creativity can never be an add-on; it should be intrinsic to worthwhile literacy activities.

In a recent research project we invited 100 four-to 11-year-olds to respond to Zoo (Red Fox pound;5.99) and The Tunnel (Walker pound;4.99) by Anthony Browne and Lily Takes a Walk by Satoshi Kitamura (Happy Cat Books pound;3.99), (all examples of complex, multi-layered picture books) through interviews, discussion and drawing. Children as young as four were keen to discuss the moral, social, spiritual and environmental issues raised, and to do so on an emotional and intellectual level. There was, though, no clear correlation between the children’s reading ability (as identified by the class teachers) and their ability to analyse visual texts. As one seven-year-old put it: “A good book has to have a problem and the problem’s in the pictures.”

Children learn through talking and through answering enabling questions. Using picture books, teachers can help them to analyse visual narrative. Exploring the relationship between word and image - and the readerly gaps deliberately left by many artists - makes demands on most of the higher-order reading skills at text level as highlighted by the literacy strategy (inference, viewpoint, style and so on) and involves deep thinking.

Some simple ideas, already familiar in many classrooms, offer an approach to using picture books with children from reception to age 13. Some books - including works by Anthony Browne, Maurice Sendak, John Burningham, Lane Smith and Jon Skeiszka - are suitable for 11-plus.

Ideally, you need a quality picture book in a Big Book version with multiple small copies. But most of the activities below can be adapted to suit your classroom situation, even when using single copies of texts, so long as you choose worthwhile picture books, read them all the way through and give the children time to look, talk and draw.

Here are questions which can be asked of the class in shared reading or of a group in guided reading; they can also be addressed by a group or pair of older children working together:

* A simple open-ended request: “Tell me about this picture”, or “Is there anything you find interestingstrange in this picture?” Follow these with:

“Why do you think Browne did that?” * Focused questions such as: “Did you notice anything special about the way Browne uses colourbody language perspectiveframes?” “Which picture did you like best?” or “Which picture do you think was the most important in the book?”, followed by “why?” * Follow-up questions make a difference. “Would you describe Zoo as a serious or funny book?” needs to be followed up with “why?”, or “can you explain that a little more?” * Ask pupils: “Draw one picture of something that you found important or memorable or expresses your point of view.” What they draw and how they explain its significance can reveal sensitivity and shrewdness about the meaning of the story.

* Take opportunities to invite pupils to draw as well as write, not just for planning and in response to texts, but as a way to express opinion, convey an argument and so on.

Learning to look in a careful and disciplined way reaps dividends. As one of the children puts it: “You don’t have to read, you just look at the pictures and think.”

If you look carefully at the picture of the tiger in Zoo, you can see a butterfly with the same colouring outside his cage and an imprint of the tiger’s outline in the faded grass. Most viewers miss both those images on a casual reading. Using guided questioning, ask the children to search for details in pictures, interpret their meaning. in this case, you can look at the contrast between captivity and freedom; the dull grass representing the tiger’s despair as it walks backwards and forwards in a confined space. Then help them to present their ideas in spoken and visual forms.

* Children Reading Pictures: Interpreting Visual Texts, is a book being prepared by Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles on the research mentioned in this article (Routledge, to be published in 2002), with contributions from Helen Bromley, Kathy Coulthard and Kate Rabey.

Morag Styles is reader in children’s literature at Homerton College, Cambridge