Analyzing Children's Books: Drawn Together

Katelyn Skinner

Feb 24, 2021

Drawn Together Written by Minh Le Illustrated by Dan Santat

Summary

The book starts off with silent images of a young boy being dropped off at his grandfather’s house. From the images, the boy doesn’t look enthused whereas the grandfather looks excited to see the young boy. As we go through each page, we see the differences between the boy in their languages and cultural identity.

The grandfather is having some type of noodle dish whereas the little boy is having a hotdog and some fries. When they try to speak, the boy is speaking English whereas the grandfather is speaking Thai. Unable to communicate, the boy sits down at the table, taking out some art supplies, and starts to draw. Fascinated by this, his grandfather pulls out a sketchbook and starts to draw with him. Together, they create this new world in their drawings, each having their own specific style that they create with. At the end of the story, they grow to enjoy each other’s artform and try out each other styles together. We can see the boy leaving in his mother’s vehicle as he is waving goodbye to his grandfather with his grandfather’s black paint brush.

My Interpretation

The book is set up as a comic/picture book. Some of the pages are split into panels and speech bubbles whereas others are entire pages of incredible artwork. I have grown to realize that the panels are generally showing the grandfather and boy interacting with one another whereas the pages full of artwork are showing the world that the boy and grandfather have created with their drawings. This is a bilingual text and features the grandfather speaking in Thai while the boy speaks in English. It also shows how two characters with different languages can come together and break down barriers when they find common interests.

The illustrations are absolutely beautiful and breathtaking. There is so much color and creativity involved from the front sleeve of the book to each individual page. When I looked at the sleeve of the cover, I noticed how brilliant the colors and drawings were and was intrigued to find what the actual cover looked like if I removed it. I didn’t understand it at first. The entire cover was black. It didn’t have the title of the book or the author or illustrator’s names. All it had was the word ‘SKETCH’ written in large white words across the top. As I dove deeper into the book, I realized the magnificence of it. It mirrored the grandfather’s sketchbook. The cover showed the grandfather’s art whereas the sleeves showed the boys style of art.

Some challenges that this book presents is having the grandfather’s speech in Thai. With this, it is difficult for those who do not speak the language to understand what the grandfather is saying. If this book is chosen for a read-aloud, how would you go about reading his words to students? Personally, I would try to find some sort of online translation and practice reading it aloud in Thai. I might write the pronunciation in English and the translation in English on a sticky note and stick it to the page under the speech bubbles for reference. It is not so important that the students know what the grandfather is saying, as it is important that they understand there is a language barrier between the characters. There are also context clues that point to the theory that the grandfather is saying the same thing that the boy is saying. For example, the grandfather has a show on TV and he peeks over at the boy who seems uninterested. The boy and grandfather both have a speech bubble in one panel where the boy is asking “Can we watch something else?” and the grandfather also seems to be asking a question as a question mark appears at the end of the speech bubble. The grandfather also is pointing in the direction of the TV and has a remote control in hand.

Overall, the book is a great selection to have in your classroom library. It is a bilingual text, cross-culture text, and shows students that by finding basic commonalities, we can break down language barriers that seem to divide us.

Author Authenticity

Minh Le Dan Santat

Minh Le (pronounced LAY) has written for the Huffington Post, New York Times, and other children’s books. He is a first-generation Vietnamese-American and has used his cultural background and experiences to help create “Drawn Together”.

Dan Santat is a Caldecott Medalist winner and the illustrator of many books. Working with Disney, he created the hit Disney series “The Replacements”. Santat’s also related well to the book’s characters as his family came from Thailand.

Instructional Use

One of the great things about this book is that it really brings out that every artist has a different style and medium that they use to create their work. One thing that you can do with your class is to tie it in with an Art class and experiment with your students to try to find the style of art they like and gravitate towards. Have them try painting in different styles and forms using different mediums or have them create fantasy self-portraits like the boy and grandfather did in the story. You could also tie the book in with a Social Studies lesson to learn about the different art styles that cultures around the world have used. You could also easily turn this into a Writing lesson. When teaching students about narrative lessons and how to craft their own, we can take bits of this book and use it to help give them ideas to start. For example, they can use the Inverted Triangle method (Dorfman & Cappelli, 2017, pg. 65) to focus in on the narrative piece they want to write about and then using drawings in panels to reflect on the timeline of events (Dorfman & Cappelli, 2017, pg. 97) similar to the panels in "Drawing Together". As Dorfman and Cappelli stated, students will have a clearer idea of what to write and process the events when they are able to draw them out. See examples below: