Power in Pictures: How a Schoolwide Photo Library Can Build a Community of Readers and Writers

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a whole picture book worth? This was exactly the question Pierce School teachers asked themselves when they began the project of compiling a photo library for creating realistic and relevant short texts by and for students across all grades in their K-8 elementary school. In an effort to motivate young readers, inspire young authors, and use literacy to strengthen the school community, teachers and students compiled photographs to create an image library for creating texts about their school community. Teachers then guided their students to create a variety of texts using photos from the shared library of images as illustrations or prompts for writing in. These student-created texts form a corpus of narrative and informational texts that build on images that are accessible and meaningful to all members of the school community. (Contains 1 table.)