Reading a wimmelbook to a kid

at even earlier phases of development the child’s perception bears an even more splintered and particular character, and that the perception of separate objects is preceded by a stage when the child is apparently able to perceive merely their separate parts or qualities and only later combines the latter into whole objects, and finally unites objects into effective situations.

 A wimmelbook(as shown in the picture above) is a type of picture book that displays panoramas of life immersed with massive characters and details. It is popular in Germany and has been translated into different world languages. Different from the traditional picture book, which is more prescribed and rigid, the whimmelbook is wordless, task-free and instruction-free. The book is introduced to kids from 2-year-old and it was said to "allow for manifold reading options and encourage a highly active response from children and adults, which rightfully might be called a form of playing.” Children will become a story-teller through the exploration of life panorama pictures as they interpret the life scenes and create their own stories.

 I found the wimmelbook really interesting the first sight I saw, I kept saying "wow" when I turned to a new page, bustling with details for life and the character. You can almost tell at least five little stories from just a corner of the page. I read the book with my cousin G, who was about 2-year-old. It's not his first time reading this book, he has read the book 3-4 times before I read with him. What I planned for our reading time is to go through pages together and we form a story through questions and interpretations. However, the plan was interrupted the first second we opened the book. The book we read was Cars and Things that Go. He did not care much about the questions I asked about the context and the clues I tried to connect. It seems like we were watching different movies in the same theater. He kept pointing to the car he recognized in the picture and yelled out the name of the car, proudly. He turned to different pages pointing to the same type of car, and began his own searching task, regardless of how much I want to talk about the things happened on the first page. The storytelling ended up with colored car searching.

 I found it interesting when I recalled the storytelling experience. My cousin was at an early stage of cognitive development while I am matured. What he perceived from the storybook is more like "It was fancy and bustling, oh, look at that red car, here, there, ball, ice cream, red cars, red cars, another page has red cars, turn to that page! ", which is totally from mine. I understand the picture as connected events, what I saw was"a man with a redshirt, sitting in his red car, while another man passes by with ice cream, and they are greeting each other. He holds a "splintered and particular perception" and maybe one day can connect the parts together to generate his own story. But I am still curious about how we read to the young kids, especially when they are cognitively young. Shall we just help them recognize stuff, or we can keep telling the context of the story even they are not paying attention? Does the social context beneath the storybook help them to form the literacy implicitly? Is that a good picture book for my cousin?