Pancakes for Breakfast

Bibliography
DePaola, Tomie. 1978. Pancakes for Breakfast. Scholastic Inc. ISBN: 0590451367.

Plot Summary
A little woman desires to eat pancakes for breakfast but doesn’t have the required ingredients for making pancakes. She has to bring fresh eggs, milk her cow for the milk, make butter, bring maple syrup…but her cat and dog are impatient and ruin her ingredients. Now how can she eat pancakes?

Critical Analysis
Pancakes for Breakfast is very well illustrated wordless picture book. There are no words in this story except for the pancake recipe and the final motto at the end. The actions and expressions in the illustrations are enough to tell the story. The illustrations are either full pages or have multiple pictures in frames describing a sequence of events. The little imagination blurbs tell how the little woman feels as she tried to make pancakes.

Children’s imagination and creativity can be encouraged by asking them to tell the story in their own words as they see the pictures. Wordless picture books are an excellent way to motivate language development in children learning to read.