Articles on Picture Books

"A Middle School Teacher's Guide for Selecting Picture Books"
This article stated a lot of obvious benefits to using picture books in middle school classrooms and a lot of new ideas I hadn't thought about. I admit that I had thought that picture books were mostly made to target elementary students and did not even really know they made picture books for older students. I was shocked to hear in the article that the majority of picture books today are written for middle school studnets. That fact really opened my eyes to such a growing trend in education. I also had not thought about the topics of the picture books coming out these days until I read this article. The article stated that more and more controversial but educational topics are now becoming the main topics for picture books. I thought that was great because they are short enough where students will read them and they will get a lot of lessons and information from them. 

"Aren't these books for little kids? "
To begin with my impressions of this article, I loved the title. I really think that is my first question I asked when we began learning about middle grades picture books. I loved how the article started out with a life example of a skeptical teacher. I also loved how this article stated what exactly qualifies as a picture book because before this I was a little confused on what exactly qualified. It was great that it compared picture books and textbook because I know that students find picture books way more interesting. Although I am not specialized in social studies I did find it interesting that this article included aspects of picking social studies books for your classroom. I really enjoyed learning more about picture books and how to implement them in my future classroom.