May Unit Plan: Argument Picture Books

This is a writing project borne of a beautiful book.

My next-door teaching bestie (and Mini Moves for Writers partner) Sam and I heard Kwame Alexander speak about his new picture book An American Story at the incredible VCSS annual conference. We typically end our year with a big joint project with our 8th graders. And so, instead of starting with learning objectives or standards to cross off a list, we began with the book: what kind of project could we dream up around this text?

In the book, Alexander makes a subtle, implicit argument about how Americans should tell the story of slavery. His answer: we tell the story of American slavery by telling the truth about history and telling the truth about hope.

So our challenge for students became: use An American Story as a mentor text to make an argument in picture-book form about another hard-to-tell story of our modern, global era.

(Wait? Why this? Because it combines Sam’s last unit of the year — globalization — with writing so we can collaborate on the project and use it for both classes!)

Ultimately, our students will create picture books using Adobe Express’s Glideshow (it’s free!), which allows us to combine pictures and words in a slick, elegant scrolling format. You can take a peek at the lame sample I made to show kids how it works. (I’ve wanted to try this format FOREVER and have been waiting for the right project!)

Let’s take a look at the unit plan:

Download this clickable unit plan by clicking the button below!