Picture Book Month Activities

After reading Picture Book Month Teacher's Guide I believe that picture books are an essential part to learning. Picture books help illustrate empathy and they help experience complex issues. These stories are short and simple to help younger children grasp the concept of the book. Picture books have been thought of as books for young children. That is not the case though picture books are for all ages. For example, in my AP English class this last week we analyzed the book The Cat In The Hat. We started off with this picture book since there is so much detail that we can use as context and textual evidence. The most important part of a picture book is the tone of the author, the moral of the story, the entire book is important. Why is is that we assume that because there are pictures in the book it's automatically for younger children? Maybe if we put aside the fact that these books are colorful and playful we would see that the author has a unique writing style. Picture books can be used in any topic you want not just for English. Many children's book help to teach us of a different culture or about the world around us. So in honor of picture book month I chose the book The Diary Of A Worm by Doreen Cronin. This book is about a worm who keeps a diary describing some cool things that happens in his life. An activity I would do to go along with this book is to use a sock and fill it with some stuffing then hot glue googly eyes. Then while we read the book we can use it to narrate the story. Then once we are done reading the boom we will be making a diary of our own! We will have the students go home and with their parents make a small diary for about a week. On Friday have the students come up and present their diaries with all everyone else. Another awesome idea would be searching for worms! We use "mud" which is pudding with crushed up Oreos on top then we put some gummy worms inside our "mud". The students each get a cup filled this mud and they can search for their worms... A bonus is that you can serve this as a snack.
This blog is run by a mom who did some worm activities with her kids go check it out.
Please make sure to check out the official website for Picture Book Month.