Bilingual Picturebook Making in the Elementary Classroom

Habia una vez, two classrooms hard at work making bilingual picturebooks. With guidance from their teachers, Latino picturebook mentors, and one another, the different materials and languages to design and publish their own bilingual picturebooks.It all began when three like-minded teacher-researchers, Nancy, Corinna, and Angie wondered, "What if elementary classroom writing included more innovative and culturally responsive* visions of writing? "Feeling the limitations of state- and district- mandated writing** as Englishonly, paper-and-pencil tasks, they desired something more for their young writers.So over the course of a year at Angie's kitchen table (with her dogs at their feet), they read, discussed, and puzzled over writing instruction for Nancy's and Corinna's grade ESL classrooms.After reading together, they concluded: composing across linguistic varieties and modalities is a more democratic orientation* to writing, one that better acknowledges students' globalized and networked worlds and everyday ways of knowing, being, and doing.They then focused their learning on picturebook making as a potential multilingual-multimodal format. They found that the synergy between the words and the illustrations within picturebooks afforded many complex openings for interpretation* and design.But what really got them excited were the possibilities of bilingual picturebook making. If children could creatively compose with diverse materials and linguistic varieties, might they better access and employ their everyday ways of knowing, being, and doing as composing resources? *So, they looked to award-winning Latino children's picturebook makers to learn how they remix** color, motifs, textures, languages, and other composing resources to evoke personal themes and histories in authentic ways.Monica was one of the 22 picturebook makers in Nancy's classroom. Like her classmates, Monica is first generation, U.S. born, and learned Spanish as her first language. Because Monica's learning and peer-related affiliations at school occurred primarily in English, Monica identified as knowing more English than Spanish. Monica explained that she only understood some Spanish and that her mother was helping her to "remember my Spanish. "In her picturebook titled, The Mystery of Ashley's Father, Monica integrated her Spanish to crafta dramatic tale of a strong and confident girl, Ashley, who vows to uncover the secret behind her father's tragic demise. Monica styled her narrative after a telenovela. *The front endpapers of Monica's picturebook depict a panoramic scene of a forest and serve as the opening setting. She makes use of directionality as Yuyi Morales did in Just a Minute (2003), with a row of water-colored trees that move the reader's eyes across the horizon, inviting the viewer to turn the page. Monica also explained that she "blended colors like Yuyi did" to achieve the rich and vibrant hues.Ashley's tale dramatically concludes with the discovery of her father's grave deep in the forest, as represented in her back endpapers. To emphasize the finality of Ashley's discovery, Monica selected, cut, and pasted in images of a tombstone, a coffin, and a skeleton as part of her endpapers. Using cut paper allowed Monica to add a pop-up feature to her coffin, daring the reader to open the lid to the coffin at the end of her picturebook.Monica explained, "I want the reader to feel that someone died in the story and that it's kinda sad. "A picturebook's endpapers* can often only be fully understood after the book is read in its entirety. In addition to using endpapers to encompass the scope of her narrative, Monica's endpapers reflect an invaluable element of her story grammar: setting- specifically, place and time. The front endpapers depicting the forest allude to the location of the father's grave and the back endpapers convey the passage of a significant amount of time. …