I love using picture books while teaching. They can fit into lessons across content areas and they are applicable for all grade levels. One of my favorite types of picture books to use are wordless picture books. There are so many creative ways to use wordless picture books in lessons. You can teach theme, mood, aspects of text illustration, story writing, dialogue, etc.
Something I like to do with wordless picture books is to introduce them at the beginning of the school year. I have students work in groups and use wordless picture books to come up with something creative, engaging, and fun.
Here are the steps to the wordless picture book group activity:
Choose the Picture Books
Determine what type of wordless picture books you want to use for your lesson. Is there something specific you’re looking for students to find or understand?
Here is a list of my favorite wordless picture books. They’re the same ones I use for this lesson.
Assign Students to Groups
You can randomly or strategically assign students to different groups. Make sure you provide rules and steps for students as they complete this task. This would be a good time to practice behavior expectations during cooperative group work too.
Lesson Steps:
- Tell students they’ll be watching a short video called Sidewalk Flowers. Ask them to pay attention to the video and write down things they notice about the video. Be broad with these directions. After giving them the directions, show the Sidewalk Flowers video.
- After watching the video, ask students to share their ideas with each other. Encourage them to add to their own notes if they didn’t have something written down that their partner did.
- Gather students together to have a quick class discussion about what they found. Record their ideas on chart paper so you can save them for the upcoming group activity. Hopefully you can guide the discussion into students noticing how the story went from black and white to color, how the adults were focused on their destination and not their surroundings, and how the little girl noticed the beauty in her surroundings and how the color in the video signified her observations. And the biggest observation, there were no words-but you can still understand the story. If you need to rewatch the video as a whole group to go over these ideas, you can do that too.
- After the discussion, tell students that this video is actually a wordless picture book. Show them the copy and “read” them the story. As you read it with them, ask students to contribute story details that they would add if they could add words to the story. You can add these ideas to the chart paper if you’d like.
- Tell students they’re going to be doing the same thing with another wordless picture book while working in a group. You can give them your expectations for the assignment.
Here are some examples:
- Work as a team to write story details that match up to the wordless picture book.
- Read the picture book first to see if you can figure out what is happening.
- Use butcher or chart paper to write details for each page.
- Include dialogue, problem/solution, and a central message or theme that fits with the illustrations.
- Be prepared to share your story with the class.
If you’re doing this activity later in the school year, you can have students include skills that you’ve already taught. You can add grammar skills, theme development, etc.
After students have finished their posters, have them share them with another group or with the whole class. Then display the posters with the wordless picture book.
You can always come back to the posters as a talking point throughout the school year, or have groups pick another wordless book and create an alternate story. Students can even create their own wordless picture books.
Insert wordless picture books into your teaching and engage your students in creativity!