Picturebooks play a vital role in the lives and learning of young children. These complex, multimodal texts offer unique opportunities for meaning-making as readers engage with the interplay between text and illustrations. Picturebooks offer children stepping stones into the literary arts, providing information and storylines that illuminate…

This article focuses on the difficult event of death. The audience for this article is classroom teachers, librarians/media specialists, curriculum developers, and so on. The purpose is to share points to consider when choosing quality picture books focusing on death as well as exemplars to represent these points. These points were concluded as a…

Picture book stories are an important tool for teaching creative dance to children. This article presents a dance activity using a picture book story that educators can use to promote movement exploration and creativity.

Through juxtaposing images and text, picturebooks have the unique power to facilitate critical reading and critical literacy. This article presents three analytical approaches to develop critical reading and critical literacy skills through picturebooks: (1) critically analyzing broad representation, (2) critical visual analysis, and (3) analyzing…

Embracing the call to reimagine education, the authors discuss "restorying"--a speculative form of storytelling--to advance insurgent pedagogies and LGBTQ+ wisdom within social studies education, particularly within anti-LGBTQ+ elementary contexts. In this article, the authors first define "restorying" and detail how it…

This Teaching and Learning Guide highlights how early childhood teachers can support emotional intelligence and inferential comprehension by drawing children's attention to characters' feelings and by asking students to notice evidence from the illustrations and text. During this read-aloud in Ms. Clark's first grade classroom, we see evidence of…

Student engagement in the process of transduction concomitantly affords them with opportunities to develop and express their critical and creative thinking competences. Reconfiguring or remaking knowledge or meaning in modes other than those of the original sources of information requires affective, imaginative and cognitive activity by…

Children's literature scholars, specifically picturebook theorist and researchers, need to better understand the complicated nature of the separation and coming together of textual matter (words) and visual matter (images) and the range of relations between these entities. Various scholars have conceptualized the relations between word and image…

The Diverse BookFinder (DBF) and its Collection Analysis Tool (CAT) were co-founded by Dr. Krista Aronson at Bates College, with support from an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant. It was recognized in 2021 by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) as one of the Best Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning. Through…

The time children spend indoors with nature-based children's literature is as important as the time they spend outdoors. Children's literature traditionally has been replete with pastoral, animal, and wilderness stories that nurture a sense of wonder and excitement about the world we share. Such literature encourages a high regard for the…

Informational texts present complex content using language that is simultaneously technical, abstract, dense, and authoritative. This article describes practical strategies to support teachers in using informational picture books to prepare upper elementary school students for navigating the complex language demands necessitated by expository…

This article shares a variety of picturebooks that invite teachers to think critically about curriculum, teaching, learning, and technology (CTLT). It posits that teaching and learning are not perfectible absolutes but continuous processes that invite teachers to develop beyond what they already know. Reading professional literature, conducting…

Nationally and internationally, we face a crisis of misinformation and disinformation (De Jesus & Hubbard, "Social Studies," 112(3), 136-145, 2021; Lee & Hosam, "Sociological Forum," 35, 996-1008, 2020). Now more than ever, children need to know how authors obtain the information included in nonfiction books. Backmatter…

In this article, the authors discuss a month-long research study where sixth grade students researched three women for the half-century after the U.S. Civil War War that worked to change their respective communities to address public issues: Jane Addams, Clara Lemlich, and Ida B. Wells. The sixth graders read a picture book for each of the three…

The US student body is rapidly diversifying, but remains unmatched by the teachers who serve in their classrooms. There is a growing understanding that teachers, particularly White teachers, must explicitly and thoughtfully engage in anti-bias and anti-racist practices in their classrooms. Our nation, and correspondingly our schools, have…