A Middle School Teacher's Guide for Selecting Picture Books

I thought this article was very helpful and informative.  Using picture books in a middle school classroom had never occurred to me before beginning this class and reading this article.  The more I think about it though, the more it really does make sense.  I was in a sixth grade classroom for my practicum last semester.  There was quite a variety of reading levels in our three classes.  A lot of the students felt comfortable with the chapter books they were reading, but I think a lot would have felt even more comfortable with picture books.  Although my teacher never used picture books in our classroom, I think it would have been a really useful tool, especially in sixth grade.  The students definitely would have still been interested and would not have found it too juvenile.  I would definitely love to incorporate picture books into my classroom one day whether I end up teaching math or English.  In an English classroom, I would want students to have to explore the deeper meanings that can be found in picture books, as the article discusses.  Discussing how the illustrations relate to the story as well as how the give the story meaning would also be an interesting topic for discussion in the middle school classroom.  I would love to incorporate picture books into my math classroom as well.  Writing is very important across subjects, so I would definitely want to read books, like Math Curse or the Sir Cumference books, to my classes to have them write about them as well as to help them understand math concepts better.