Reading and Writing for Social Awareness: Focusing on the Genre of Picture Books

What are your favorite picture books from childhood? What do you remember about them?

For homework, find and bring in some examples of picture books. Be ready to read aloud and share them in class tomorrow.

In this unit, we will be reading a range of picture books, some light-hearted and funny, and others serious and tragic. We will be looking closely at forewords, social issues raised, author’s purpose, and writing craft; the final project is writing a picture book on a social issue.

This will also be a writing unit in which you tell a meaningful story that teaches, directly or indirectly, an important social message.

The social issues we will be reading and writing about fall into certain categories:

• Social Pressure – How do others tell us how to be? What are the consequences? Ex. Bullying, gangs, war, etc.
• Social Consciousness – What good actions should we be involved with and why? Ex. Increase funds for public schools, volunteer to clean up parks, etc.
• Acceptance vs. Intolerance – Who is and isn’t accepted and why? Ex. Racism, homophobia, etc.

Author’s Purpose – the books we will be reading have different purposes; they do one or more of the following:

• Call to action – urge people to act in a particular way to solve a problem
• Envision possibility – show that there is hope in the future in solving a problem
• Bear witness – focus on the difficulties experienced as a result of a particular problem

Styles – there are different ways to communicate messages around issues:

• Realistic fiction – a fictional story; can also include elements of non-fiction; may be creative non-fiction or historical fiction
• Allegory – a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
Thus, an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.
• Poetry
• Nonfiction 

Now it's time to delve into some literary treasures... The first book we are going to be reading is And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson. Enjoy!