The Power of Picture Books
from NCTE INBOX 7-6-11
Kadir Nelson, author and illustrator of We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball, joins other keynote speakers Ernest Morrell, Mariana Souto-Manning, and Linda Christensen at the July 21-24 Literacies for All Summer Institute. We Are the Ship, which took Nelson almost eight years to complete, was named an honor book in the 2009 Orbis Pictus Awards for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children. Picture books offer powerful opportunities for classroom learning -- explore the ideas listed below from NCTE and ReadWriteThink.org.
"The Role of Genre in Preschoolers' Response to Picture Books" (G), from Research in the Teaching of English, describes the ways in which a small group of preschoolers responded to four genres of picture books: fantasy, realistic, poetic, and information.
The Language Arts article "Beyond Picture Walks: Revaluing Picturebooks as Written and Pictorial Texts" (E-M) explains how reading the pictorial text (illustrations) as well as the written text in picture books gives students another path into the story, challenges their thinking, and enriches their understanding.
The Power of Picture Books: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School (M) features descriptions and activities for 50 picture book titles. The authors offer a wealth of ideas for harnessing the power of picture books to improve reading and writing in the content areas. View the recording of the authors' Web seminar, Middle School Content Area Literature: Picturing the Possibilities, with teachers throughout your school and take an inside look at the picture books that draw middle school students into language arts, social studies, mathematics, science, and the arts.
ReadWriteThink.org offers numerous lesson plans on using picture books in the classroom with elementary, intermediate, and middle level students.
In the lesson plan "Picture Books as Framing Texts: Research Paper Strategies for Struggling Writers" (M), students use picture books as framing texts for research, freeing them from the language of encyclopedia sources and allowing them to focus their attention on the content of their papers. This lesson plan was adapted from Deborah Dean’s Voices from the Middle article "Framing Texts: New Strategies for Student Writers."
"A Multidisciplinary Approach to Literacy through Picture Books and Drama" (S) from English Journal describes a multidisciplinary unit on World War II that pushes high school students to use visual and print literacies to analyze, comprehend, and relate to public events and private struggles from history.
The College Composition and Communication article "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing" (C) explores what can happen when the visual is very consciously brought into the composition classroom as a form of communication worth both examining and producing.
If you're looking for book suggestions for yourself or colleagues, NCTE offers the following resources:
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