Picture Books in High School? Try This Introductory Lesson Idea

Getting started might just be the hardest part of, well, pretty much anything.

Sometimes we (or our students) need to muster up the energy to transition into something new. Sometimes we have no idea what to say. If you’ve ever watched a student spend an entire class period writing nothing because they “can’t think of a good hook,” you know what we mean (and we’ve got you covered).

The same is true for lesson planning, specifically the introductory lesson. 

If you’re like us, guiding students through the reading is no problem. Maybe you’re a creative type, and you always have a great idea for a final project. Maybe you have a go-to essay structure that you can quickly adapt for any prompt.

But the introductory lesson? It can leave us staring at blank screens, just like our students.

Once you start to fill your teacher toolkit with classroom-tested activities, however, it becomes easier to identify options. And one of our go-to tools for an introductory lesson is the classic children’s picture book.

The Purpose of an Introductory Lesson

Before we dive into how, specifically, we used picture books in our classroom, we want to take a minute to review why an introductory lesson is even necessary in the first place. Can’t we just . . . start reading? Or writing? Like a student who wonders why their introduction paragraph can’t just be a thesis statement, we might be tempted to consider an introductory lesson “fluff” and skip right over it.

But introductory lessons serve a few important purposes.

An introductory lesson allows you to provide students with the basic information they need to be successful in the unit.

In our novel units, we often used our introductory lesson to provide students with background information about the author or time period that would help them to better navigate the text, whether it was a lecture on Regency Era England, a pre-To Kill a Mockingbird jigsaw activity, or our Introduction to Shakespeare escape room.

In our skill-based units, we introduced terminology, often literary terms, that we’d use throughout the unit. In some cases, we introduced a brand-new term and provided opportunities to practice with it; in other cases, we reviewed what students had learned in previous classes (and forgotten).

For many of our students, reading is difficult or unenjoyable. When we’re introducing a new literary analysis skill, it’s often helpful to practice using that skill in an easy, low-stakes context before adding the challenge of reading into the mix.

Many of us need time to transition between one task and another, and our students are no exception. Making time for an introductory lesson allows our students to stop thinking about whatever unit we just finished and start thinking about our new unit.

When we make time to introduce key themes or important context, we help students know what to look for as we begin reading. Instead of trying to make sense of a text from the ground up, students have clues and footholds they can use to start the process of making meaning.

When planned well, introductory lessons are fun! Most of us are constantly on the lookout for ways to engage students, and especially for those of us who tend to stick to regular routines, the introductory lesson is a great place to inject some excitement and creativity into our curriculum.

Why Picture Books Work Well for an Introductory Lesson

Good old-fashioned picture books make a great resource when designing an introductory lesson.

In our experience, students—even high school students—enjoy being read to and love a good bout of nostalgia. It never failed to amaze us how closely our students paid attention when we read a picture book aloud, even those whose attentions we regularly struggled to capture.

Part of the reason picture books work so well is that they’re short and simple. When you’re introducing a skill, particularly one like making a plot diagram, writing a theme statement, or analyzing a dynamic character, you need a full story to work with. We’ve learned that trying to do these activities with excerpts just doesn’t work well. In contrast to excerpts, a picture book tells a whole story and doesn’t task adolescent comprehension levels.

And there’s something wholesome about picture books. We’re big fans of using Pixar shorts as part of an introductory lesson, but sometimes we need to get students away from screens. And using picture books removes the challenge of trying to balance “high-interest” with “school-appropriate.”

How to Display the Pictures to Students

One of the best parts of reading picture books is, of course, the pictures. If students can’t see the pictures, a significant part of the reading experience is lost. But with class sizes hovering around (or above—eek!) 40 in many school districts, visibility can be a challenge. And purchasing class sets for a single introductory lesson isn’t worth the expense.

If you have a smaller class size (and a classroom with space), you can channel your inner elementary school teacher and gather the students round for story time, displaying the pictures as you read. You could also walk around showing off the pictures after reading each page.

Our go-to option was using a document camera to project the pages as we read aloud. Sometimes it’s tough to get the right angle, however, in which case you could try taking photos of each page and inserting them into a Google Slides presentation or even recording a video that you can play while you read aloud. (You could certainly record or find a video of the book being read aloud, but there’s something about you reading to them that students particularly enjoy.)

Our Top Recommendations for Picture Books to Use in Class

Plot Diagrams

For many years, we started our plot unit with Chris Van Allsburg’s Jumanji. After reading the story, we made sentence strips (laminated, with magnets on the back) that student volunteers placed in the appropriate place on the whiteboard to build a plot diagram. You could also have students do this on their own or in groups with strips of paper before reviewing it as a class.

In later years, we transitioned to using Pixar shorts, but Jumanji worked well.

You could also use fairy tales like “The Three Little Pigs” or “Cinderella” for this purpose. We used fairy tales on multiple occasions to introduce our homework graphic organizer so that students could learn our expectations with a simple text.

Point of View

Picture books (or, more broadly, children’s books) also work well when teaching students to identify different points of view (first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient).

Our AP Literature textbook used one of Aesop’s Fables (“The Ant and the Grasshopper”) in its “Point of View” chapter introduction, rewriting the very short excerpt from each point of view so we could tangibly see how the story changed when the point of view did. Pro Tip: We do not recommend using Aesop’s Fables for practice writing theme statements—students struggle to write theme statements as opposed to morals.

One year, Steph spent the better part of an afternoon wandering around a bookstore and pulling paragraph excerpts from a range of chapter books (like Harry Potter and Sideways Stories from Wayside School) to create a practice worksheet for identifying point of view. We hoped students would enjoy a nice hit of nostalgia from books they read and loved in elementary school, but it also made for simple yet fun examples.

We also used Jon Scieszka’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs at the beginning of our point of view unit to highlight why identifying point of view matters. Scieszka’s delightful book tells the story of the Three Little Pigs from the Big Bad Wolf’s perspective. Naturally, it’s quite a different story.

Figurative Language

For a few years, we used Peggy Parish’s classic Amelia Bedelia to introduce the idea of an idiom: Amelia Bedelia is known for taking instructions far too literally, to disastrous effect. The humorous examples helped illustrate the term for students. Pro Tip: We’d recommend using the updated Young Amelia Bedelia books now. Some of the idioms in the original are based on phrases that aren’t used anymore.

Picture books are rife with examples of figurative language, so we’re sure there are many other good options you could use here (excuse for a trip to Barnes and Noble?). Picture books are especially great for teaching sound devices like rhyme, alliteration, and onomatopoeia—two of our favorites are Bess Kalb’s Buffalo Fluffalo and the BabyLit take on Hound of the Baskervilles.

Theme

While we finally settled on using Pixar shorts to teach students how to write theme statements, we went through many other options over the years, including a variety of nursery rhymes and Shel Silverstein poems. The Pixar shorts worked better for us, but these classics are still great places to look when you’re brainstorming ideas for an introductory lesson.

Irony

One of our favorite units to teach was our sophomore unit on irony and related devices. We spent a couple weeks practicing the skill of identifying these devices in increasingly challenging texts, and near the beginning of the unit, we used three delightful children’s books: Ellen Jackson’s Cinder Edna, Jon Scieszka’s The Frog Prince, Continued, and Chris Van Allsburg’s Just a Dream.

For each of the three texts, we pre-identified examples of dramatic irony, verbal irony, situational irony, ambiguity, incongruity, and contradiction (the literary devices covered in our textbook), and as we read the picture book aloud, students matched the quotations to the correct literary device.

Allusions

While we never ended up using these in class, Steph has fallen in love with the BabyLit series of board books and frequently includes them in baby shower gifts. These books transform literary classics into board books for babies: if you’re familiar with how few words appear in a board book, you can imagine what a challenge this can be to adapt. The results are adorable, and it’s quite impressive how many details from the original novels the authors manage to squeeze in.

This could be a great way to practice identifying allusions with your students or the inspiration for your students to transform your class novel into a board book.

Steph’s favorites are Pride and Prejudice (a counting primer), Frankenstein (an anatomy primer), The Odyssey (a monsters primer), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (a camping primer). And, of course, The Hound of the Baskervilles mentioned above (a sounds primer).

Project Introduction

On multiple occasions, we also had our students create picture books as the end project for a unit (especially in AP Literature), and we often used example picture books as a model for what students would be creating.

Steph’s sister-in-law, a former elementary school teacher, always wanted to use Erin Cabatingan’s A Is for Musk Ox (which is hilarious) as a springboard for an alphabet book project but struggled to come up with one that would be the right level for her students. When Steph heard about it, she realized the opportunities for an alphabet book in high school are endless.

The introductory lesson is a key part of any unit plan, and picture books make a great resource for designing an introductory lesson that students will find accessible and engaging. We know we’ve only scratched the surface of the options available, and we’d love to know what picture books you’ve incorporated into your classroom (or are inspired to incorporate after reading this post).

If you love the idea of using children’s stories for an introductory lesson, check out our Pixar theme activity, in which students write theme statements for a series of Pixar shorts, our plot mini-unit, where students create plot diagrams for Pixar shorts as one activity, or our theme mini-essay based on The LEGO Batman Movie. They may not be picture books, but they accomplished a similar purpose for our students at a variety of levels.