Narrative picture books are often used to advance linguistic and literary skills of preschoolers. But there is a strong bias towards books, which combine texts and pictures. Research on this sort of picturebook is very useful, but the role of the pictures is more or less reduced to one function - they are merely used to illustrate the story. The present article examines text-free picturebooks; it is meant to demonstrate their potential for the understanding of the specific structure of narrative transmission. In a first step, the structural features of text-free picturebooks are shown for The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher by Molly Bang (1980). In a second step, a typical problem of understanding the structure of narrative transmission of Molly Bang's book is analysed; it is demonstrated, in which aspects children need parental support and how parents promote the child. Results show how important it is to understand 〉reading〈 of visual narrative as a skill itself.