The pages became full of minute details as they envisioned being in that place. It was time consuming and more work than Ben and the other students really wanted to do. They needed constant encouragement to finish the work. As we worked on the thumbnail sketches, the similarity between the writing process and illustrating books became very apparent. Because I regularly use graphic organizers with my small groups, we took one lesson period to work on a Venn diagram that compared the two processes.
Graphic organizers help arrange important aspects of a topic into a pattern.
They contain key information that is easier to remember than extended text. Our Venn diagram showed us that the writing and illustrating processes were similar. The writing process typically includes pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. I saw a similar process for illustrations. Before the students began to draw, Paul had them look at each page of their stories and make lists of all the things they wanted to include on each page.