Little Blue and Little Yellow  by Leo Lionni (1959)

    This is an old favorite that encourages Narrative Skills in a pretty unique way.  Since the characters are all blobs of color, it's almost impossible to read this without using Dialogic Reading, as the storyteller and the kids talk about the pictures and fill in the story details.  You can talk about the basic story elements ("which one do you think is little yellow's mama?") and get into some of the trickier bits of the story ("why are their tears yellow and blue?").  After reading, you can encourage parents to have their child tell the story on their own, just using the pictures, as a way to develop Narrative Skills.  A cool follow-up can be to cut out some colored circles out of cellophane (or tissue:  that's what Lionni was playing with when he came up with the idea for the book) and demonstrate how red and blue become green when they overlap and other combinations.

- Steven Engelfried