As Jill mentioned in her previous post, she and I both changed schools this year. I am now media center specialist at a PreK through 8th grade Catholic school. In my previous district, I was able to build a culture of read alouds and visual literacy starting with my youngest readers and together we honed our skills and applied our shared prior knowledge to more and more complex illustrated texts as the years progressed. By the time I had developed my current understanding of teaching visual literacy, students had every year K-5 evolved with me.
With a new school come new joys and challenges. The former media center specialist had a passion for middle grade and young YA fiction. The school collection is exceptional in these areas. I am having a wonderful time reading my way through the collection to improve my readers advisory skills. On the other hand, the story rug was reserved for kindergarten and first grade exclusively. The library is a main floor with a loft. Picture books reside upstairs, chapter books downstairs and no one was permitted to check out from the other grades floor. As a result, picture books were selected for teaching reading, not as tools for older classrooms. Not familiar with the collection or this history I began the school year bringing in my own copy of Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael Lopez beautiful book, The Day You Begin to share with students. They were surprised and more than a little dismayed to be brought upstairs to the story rug. I was surprised how much coaching my new students required to find the deeper meaning of the story through the art.
I strongly believe in the power of picture book art and am trying to bring picture book read alouds to 6th through 8th graders who have not savored the format in many years. Wanting to bring a visual thinking lens to other projects we will undertake together throughout the year, I began introducing the skills in a variety of contexts.
I partnered with the ELA teacher for 8th grade first. We looked at her reading list for the first semester and I found primary sources to enrich background knowledge of the time period and setting of two of her selections using photographs from the Library of Congress and National Archives digital collections. We asked the classic visual thinking strategy questions “What’s going on in this picture?” “What makes you say that?” “What more can you find?” to which I added, “What was the photographers purpose in creating the image?” I also pushed into science and talked about elements of layout and design while students created infographics to show their knowledge of specific volcanoes around the world.
To transition this knowledge to illustrated books I shared part one of Molly Bang’s classic illustration guide Picture This. The book breaks down elements of design including color, shape and object placement to create setting, mood, and to define the relationship between characters using scenes from Little Red Riding Hood.
The next week I explicitly taught picture book vocabulary including trim size, gutter, end paper, frame, typography, frame, white space, bleed, palate, and double page spread with exemplars highlighting meaningful use of the element. Students were then given stacks of picture books at tables and with a partner had to identify which techniques illustrators used in award winning and Caldecott worthy books.
Our next two library classes were spent reading aloud books together and talking about how specific elements of the art enhanced meaning in Kwame Alexander and Kadir Nelson’s brilliant illustrated poem, The Undefeated. We also delved in Duncan Tonatiuh’s Mixtec codex inspired art for his book Separate is Never Equal. Next week, this group of students will assist me in selecting the books I will use for the younger grades mock Caldecott vote. Most of books I will give my 8th graders to choose from are on my personal list of contenders, but a few will be popular titles that I do not believe to be as exceptional for the purposes of informally evaluating what they have learned in this process.
Stay tune. I hope to have their selections posted for you by the end of next week.