Photocopiable classroom resource - Using pictures to promote writing

Sandy's Picture Stories is designed for busy teachers of Beginner ESL. Each Unit is based on a topic useful for new immigrants like "The Noisy Neighbor" or "The Burglar". Every Unit begins with a series of pictures meant to be copies on to light card stock and cut into card sets. This is followed by a randomized card set of key words and another of sentences. Students are meant to sequence the pictures and invent the story, then match key words to pictures and revise their story. More advanced students can match the pictures with the sentence cards and to read the story to a partners. This if followed by a correct sentence sequence so students can read it silently and orally and adjust their picture stories if needed. Next we have a word scramble to reinforce vocabulary learning and scrambled sentences to build grammar and syntax awareness. The unit concludes with a listening exercise to further reinforce learning. The total two-hour lesson is quick and easy to prepare yet is engaging and involving so students participate eagerly. This is a handy book that all teachers of Beginner ESL will want to have.

Why use picture books with children? -- Extending picture books through art -- Extending picture books through drama -- Extending picture books through music -- Extending picture books through math -- Extending picture books through science.

A pioneering study of a unique narrative form, Words about Pictures examines the special qualities of picture books--books intended to educate or tell stories to young children. Drawing from a number of aesthetic and literary sources, Perry Nodelman explores the ways in which the interplay of the verbal and visual aspects of picture books conveys more narrative information and stimulation than either medium could achieve alone. Moving from "baby" books, alphabet books, and word books to such well-known children's picture books as Nancy Ekholm Burkert's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Gerald McDermott's Arrow to the Sun, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and Chris Van Allsburg's The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, Nodelman reveals how picture-book narrative is affected by the exclusively visual information of picture-book design and illustration as well as by the relationships between pictures and their complementary texts.

Mandated to foster a sense of national cohesion The National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division was the country's official photographer during the mid-twentieth century. Like the Farm Security Administration and other agencies in the US, the NFB used photographs to serve the nation. Division photographers shot everything from official state functions to images of the routine events of daily life, producing some of the most dynamic photographs of the time, seen by millions of Canadians - and international audiences - in newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, and filmstrips. In The Official Picture, Carol Payne argues that the Still Photography Division played a significant role in Canadian nation-building during WWII and the two decades that followed. Payne examines key images, themes, and periods in the Division's history - including the depiction of women munitions workers, landscape photography in the 1950s and 60s, and portraits of Canadians during the Centennial in 1967 - to demonstrate how abstract concepts of nationhood and citizenship, as well as attitudes toward gender, class, linguistic identity, and conceptions of race were reproduced in photographs. The Official Picture looks closely at the work of many Division photographers from staff members Chris Lund and Gar Lunney during the 1940s and 1950s to the expressive documentary photography of Michel Lambeth, Michael Semak, and Pierre Gaudard, in the 1960s and after. The Division also produced a substantial body of Northern imagery documenting Inuit and Native peoples. Payne details how Inuit groups have turned to the archive in recent years in an effort to reaffirm their own cultural identity. For decades, the Still Photography Division served as the country's image bank, producing a government-endorsed "official picture" of Canada. A rich archival study, The Official Picture brings the hisotry of the Division, long overshadowed by the Board's cinematic divisions, to light.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.