What Are You Doing This Month?

What is your favorite type of book?

I am a big fan of picture books for children or all ages (even adults)!

According to the School Library Journal, a group of authors and illustrators banded together to declare November 2011 as the first Picture Book Month:

Picture Book Month is an international initiative to encourage and celebrate literacy with picture books, says founder Dianne de Las Casas, an author and storyteller, who along with authors/illustrators Katie Davis, Elizabeth O. Dulemba, Wendy Martin, and author Tara Lazar have joined forces to spread the word that picture books are alive and well, especially in this digital age where an unprecedented amount of picture books have been made into ebooks and are on ereading devices such as the iPad, the Nook, and the Kindle.

Since it is Picture Book Month again in 2012:

• I could make an extra long list of my favorite picture book and/or authors of picture book.
• I could develop a list of reasons for teachers to read picture books with their students.
• I could look through my writing resources and provide a list of picture books to use to highlight certain writing skills for students.
• I could approach this from an art perspective to describe the importance of the pictures in picture books.

Look at all these resources (all the sites listed are content partners of Thinkfinity):

Wonderopolis

• #254 Why don’t all books have pictures?
• #340 How many different ways can you read?
• #376 Where is the Hundred Acre Wood?
• #226 How can you become a better reader?
• #210 Who was Mother Goose?
• #150 Who was Theodore Geisel?

ReadWriteThink (I was surprised how many resources I found for middle and high school)

• The Children’s Picture Book Project
• Picture Books as Framing Texts: Research Paper Strategies for Struggling Writers
• Using Picture Books to Explore Identity, Stereotyping, and Discrimination
• Creative Writing Through Wordless Picture Books
• Inclusive Stories: Teaching About Disabilities With Picture Books
• Using Picture Books to Teach Setting Development in Writing Workshop
• Using Children’s Literature to Spark Learning
• Postmodern Picture Books in Middle School
• Females in the Spotlight: Strong Characters in Picture Books
• Comparing and Contrasting: Picturing an Organizational Pattern Using Picture Books as Mentor Texts
• Preparing for the Journey: An Introduction to the Hero Myth Using Picture Books

ArtsEdge 

• Set a Poem to Music:  After exploring a “singable” picture book as a class, each student examines a personally selected poem for rhythm to determine its musical meter. Using previous musical skills, students set the poem to music. As a final reflection, they create a two-page spread of a picture book that contains their “singable” poem.
• Map it Out:  Explore how illustrations contribute to the telling of a story by creating illustrations to accompany text, and then creating text to accompany illustrations. Students will explore picture books (without words) and discuss the specific elements of the illustrations that “tell” the story. They will learn to “read” illustrations as they look at the ways in which pictures reveal information about the characters, setting, and plot of a story.
• Animal Habitats: Pre-readers are introduced to animal habitats through story, song, and dramatic play using children’s picture books. Students use chronological ordering and phonics to reinforce beginning literacy skills. Students explore a non-traditional method of book illustration and create their own story page

Let’s Celebrate Picture Books this month and all year long!!

What are things you can do to celebrate Picture Book Month?

*I created the word cloud by copying and pasting a list of picture book titles using Wordle.net (I used a tilde ~ between words to keep the words in the titles together)

*Title Image created using LetteringDelights.com