Something mentioned during our guest lecture session today with Dr. Kathy Shoemaker really resonated with me: the importance of incorporating picture books in our classes and teaching our students to become multiliterate. As educators, we need to adapt to the evolving needs of our students.
A picture book I really like and think is enjoyable for all ages is “Love You Forever” by Robert Munsch, illustrated by Sheila McGraw. What is your favourite picture book?
I agree. Multi-literacy is so important to teach if we want our students to succeed. I really like the use of picture books as another form of literacy within a classroom, whether it is an English class or not. For ELL students, picture books are great ways of providing the content they need to understand a story without a wall of text. It is also fun for them to interpret the pictures and write their own text to accompany wordless books. They are engaged and it is an opportunity for them to creatively use English.
Hi Judy,
I agree! Picture books are so wonderful to introduce students to the concept of visual literacy and analyzing how visuals enhance our ideas and written work (and by extension, how they work in the world in terms of movies, videos, advertisements, etc.). I think there’s a lot of room to play with multimodal texts in our classrooms, and a lot of storytelling activities you could introduce with textless or limited-text books.
Two of my favourite picture books were among the many Dr. Shoemaker shared with us yesterday – Fox by Margaret Wild and Lost and Found by Shaun Tan. The stunning full-page visuals coupled with the very real, deep, and important themes in both make for extremely complex, compelling, and accessible reads.