Abstract The purpose of the 6-week qualitative study was to explore how Grade 1 children responded to five picturebooks by Anthony Browne during interactive read-alouds. The 13 participants and the other non-participants were organized into four mixed gender and mixed reading-ability groups. Data included transcripts from 20 small group read-aloud sessions and field notes that documented additional student affective responses to the texts. Other data included the children’s drawings that were completed after each picturebook small group read-aloud session, as well as transcripts of the students’ individual interviews about their artistic responses. Coding of student conversation turns during the read-aloud sessions revealed the identification of six categories of statements. These six categories were then applied to the students’ individual interview data to facilitate comparison between the two settings. The artwork and interviews of three students were analyzed as three individual cases and represented a sample of student readers of differing abilities. Data analysis of the read-aloud session transcripts revealed that labeling statements accounted for approximately one-third of all student comments. The remaining students’ statements were categorized as following: approximately one-quarter were character description, one-fifth were ‘other,’ (i.e. indecipherable statements and/or off-topic comments), approximately one-tenth were character feeling, less than one-tenth were autobiographical, and a small amount were intertextual in nature. The comparison of the three focus children’s individual interviews to their small group conversations revealed that the children generated a greater number of autobiographical statements during the individual interviews about their art. Implications for research and pedagogy included teaching and conducting research about visual literacy that involves pre- and post-treatment study, and examining children’s conversations about characters in picturebooks by numerous authors. / Graduate