The PEPELT team selects high quality Picturebooks and our principles guide our Picturebook choices and our aims.

Our aims:

  • To create a lively, engaged and sharing community of teachers as well as librarians, teacher educators and researchers – using picturebooks in PELT
  • To encourage the sharing of ideas for teaching PELT with picturebooks
  • To promote and support the use of picturebooks in PELT
  • To publicise information about picturebooks for PELT
  • To help teachers and other professionals move away from the conventional often found in mainstream coursebook materials by selecting picturebooks which encourage critical thinking, and which mirror children’s reality where children from all backgrounds and identities can see themselves represented.

Our choices:

We choose picturebooks that …

  • diverse in design and illustration, 
  • diverse in content and theme,
  • created by authors / illustrators of diverse backgrounds and identities, and
  • aligned with key events or days on the international diversity calendar.

We use picturebooks to….

  • enable teachers and children to discover a world where learning moves beyond the classroom.
  • provide ‘mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors’ (Sims Bishop 1990) where children see themselves reflected, windows for children to see other worlds, real or imagined, familiar or strange and sliding doors, for them to walk through.
  • integrate diversity themes into the primary classroom – diversity in age, gender, race or ethnicity, disability, religion or belief and sexual orientation as well as promote values such as kindness, tolerance, openness, friendship, etc.
  • help children develop a critical stance towards the world they live in.
  • give teachers the confidence to address topics which may not appear in their mainstream course materials. 

Sims Bishop, R. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives, 1(3), ix–xi.