Featuring descriptions and activities for fifty exceptional titles, Mary Jo Fresch and Peggy Harkins offer a wealth of ideas for harnessing the power of picture books to improve reading and writing in the content areas.
Power of Picture Books, The: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School
Postmodern Picture Books in Middle School
Students analyze the structure of a postmodern picture book, Black and White, to uncover how authors create unexpected plots and connections and form relationships between words and illustrations.
Creative Writing Through Wordless Picture Books
Students are exposed to wordless picture books and begin developing story lines, both orally and in writing, using an online, interactive story map.
Using Picture Books to Teach Characterization in Writing Workshop
Students explore character development through experiences with picture books. They learn about the connections between reading and writing and apply the information they learn to revisions of their own writing.
Using Picture Books to Teach Setting Development in Writing Workshop
Students use a graphic organizer to analyze setting development in picture books. They then apply what they have learned to their own writing.
Teaching Science Through Picture Books: A Rainforest Lesson
Students read Welcome to the Green House, use note-taking strategies, find patterns in text structure, learn vocabulary in context, and write efferent and affective responses to the text.
Sound and Sense in Children's Picturebooks
Explores (from the point of view of the writer, a children's author) one aspect of learning about language that is present in the picture books he writes: the relation between sound and sense.
Flip Book
The Flip Book is designed to allow users to type and illustrate tabbed flip books up to ten pages long. Students and teachers can use the flip book for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating question and answer booklets.
Stapleless Book
The Stapleless Book can be used for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating vocabulary booklets . . . the possibilities are endless!
Children's Book Project
This activity can help teens create picture books that a teen caregiver can then share with children.
Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges: Critical Discussion of Social Issues
Through a series of picture book read-alouds, students engage in critical discussion of complex issues of race, class, and gender.
NCTE's NCTE Orbis Pictus Award® for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children is announced today.
Students conduct research and write original works of nonfiction on topics of their choice.
Author Eve Bunting was born in Ireland in 1928.
Students listen to a news article about the LA race riots and then read Smoky Night to discuss how a younger observer might be affected by these events and their perceptions.
Preparing for the Journey: An Introduction to the Hero Myth
Students read a variety of picture books that contain elements of the hero's journey and use an online interactive tool to analyze the stories.
Reading and Writing About Whales Using Fiction and Nonfiction Texts
Students will have a whale of a good time in this lesson in which they use fiction and nonfiction texts to write a letter to an online scientist.
Jane Yolen was born in 1939.
Students read one of Jane Yolen's books, retell the story in the form of a puppet show, research animals in the book, and document their findings with the Animal Study interactive tool.
Roald Dahl was born on this day in 1916.
Students adapt a Roald Dahl story to picture book format and share their books and add them to the classroom library. Additionally, they compare a book version and film version of one of Dahl's works.
Author Laura Joffe Numeroff was born in 1953.
Using one of Numeroff's books as a model, students use the circle plot structure as a culminating project for a unit of study completed in the classroom.
Visual Texts for Teens
Readers of picture books and graphic novels know that visual images sometimes tell a story in a way that words cannot. Tune in to hear about newly-published middle grade and young adult fiction, graphic novels, biographies, travel memoirs, and informational books, all of which use visual material in ways that enrich the text's meaning.
"Framing Texts: New Strategies for Student Writers"
Using children's picture books, Deborah Dean provided frameworks for student research papers that avoided the pitfalls leading to voiceless and encyclopedic writing. Research guide sheets; class analysis of text organization, sentence variety, stylistic choices; and peer review all contribute to interesting final papers.