Murals
Murals provide children with opportunities to work and plan together. These collaborative efforts need planning, and teachers might suggest that children make preliminary drawings or sketches before beginning. Lightly chalked areas on the final mural paper help children visualize the overall picture. A mural can also be assembled more easily by pasting children's artwork to a background. Older children might discuss how variation in size and shading, or overlapping, creates the illusion of depth.
       Murals can be organized around events in one story, a synthesis of children's favorite characters, or a topic or theme of study. One fourth-grade class made individual collage representations of houses from favorite folktales that were later glued in place along a picture of a winding road. Baba Yaga's chicken-footed house from Russian folktales stood between the witch's house from "Hansel and Gretel" and the giant's castle from "Puss in Boots." A written explanation for each house accompanied the mural.
       By providing a variety of materials and some organizing assistance, a teacher can help children successfully create eye-catching murals. Backgrounds can be quickly filled in with printing, using sponges dipped in paint for leaves and bushes or potato-printed tree shapes. It is important, both for a writing opportunity and for the many people who will view it, to complete the display of a mural with an explanation of the way it was made.

Media Exploration
A teacher can make use of a child's desire to replicate an illustrator's way of working by encouraging children to explore various media. The following examples show how students of different ages approached various book-art projects. Kindergarten children saved their finger-painting pictures, cut them up, and used them to create their own story illustrated in the collage style of three of Eric Carle's stories, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Very Busy Spider, and The Very Quiet Cricket. After seeing Leo Lionni's Swimmy, a group of primary children used lace paper doilies and watercolors to make prints creating similar underwater effects. Older children used dampened rice paper, ink, and watercolor to try to capture the look of traditional Japanese artwork used by Anne Buguet in On Cat Mountain by Francoise Richard, and by Suekichi Akaba in The Crane Wife by Sumiko Yagawa. In a variety of ways, all those children were answering for themselves the question "How did the illustrator make the pictures?"
       Techniques that easily translate to the elementary classroom include collage, scratchboard, marbleized paper, many varieties of painting and printing, and stencil prints. By making these materials and processes readily available for children, teachers can extend the ways in which they visualize their world as well as their appreciation for illustrators' works.
       hough schools can buy commercially prepared scratchboard, similar results can be achieved by crayoning heavily on shiny-surfaced cardboard, then covering the crayon with India ink dabbed on with a cotton ball, and then scratching designs or illustrations through the ink with pin or scissor points after the ink has thoroughly dried. This process is tedious, so the technique is more suited for older children. A simpler "crayon resist" can be done by applying watercolor or black tempera paint over a crayon drawing. It is easy to put several drops of food coloring in water and let children paint this wash over crayon drawings to create sky, forest, or other background.
       Marbleized paper has frequently been used in collage and endpapers of well-made books. Children can create marbleized paper using any paper and one of several kinds of color. Commercial marbleizing kits are available from school art supply catalogs, but binders such as cornstarch added to water achieve satisfactory effects. Fill kitty litter pans or disposable or old baking pans with water and drop the color on the water surface. Acrylic paint works well and does not entail the messy cleanup that enamel paint does. Some types of poster paint and India ink also give good results. Place a piece of paper face down on the water and floating color, being careful not to trap air bubbles between paper and water. Gently lift the paper and hang it to dry. Colored chalk also provides a pleasing effect and poses fewer cleanup problems for younger children. Large sticks of sidewalk chalk may be grated over the water with a small piece of window screen or an old sieve. Results must be sprayed with fixative or hairspray when dry. Marbleized paper may be cut and used in collage or in the making of books as endpapers and covers.

Carle, Eric. The Very Busy Spider. Philomel, 1984.
———. The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Putnam, 1989 [1969].
———. The Very Quiet Cricket. Philomel, 1990.
Lionni, Leo. Swimmy. Pantheon, 1963.
Richard, Francoise. On Cat Mountain. Illustrated by Anne Buguet. Putnam, 1994.
Yagawa, Sumiko. The Crane Wife. Translated by Katherine Paterson. Illustrated by Suekichi Akaba. Morrow, 1981.

Making Alphabet Books
One teacher of fifth-grade language arts gave her students fifty alphabet books and asked them to decide which ones were easier, which more difficult, and why. On the second day, they categorized the collection on four large wall charts (see "Alphabet Books" in Chapter 4). The 10-year-olds were surprised to see challenging titles like Jonathan Hunt's medieval informational book Illuminations, Winton Marsalis's Jazz A.B.Z., and Max Grover's Accidental Zucchini. When the teacher asked children to make their own 26-letter alphabet books, the results were diverse. There were ABC books of sports, foods, animals, favorite hobbies such as fishing, riddles, lift-the-flap, hidden-picture ABCs, and alliterative stories. The class was so proud of its work that they held an author party at which children shared their work with parents. Another class of older children read Brian Jacques's Redwall, a fantasy set in a medieval fortress defended by mice. They used an alphabet format and extracted events and things from the book to create their own "A Is for Abbey" book.
       Alphabet books are handy organizers of information from a thematic study. Teachers might use this as a whole-class project on a topic such as ecology, especially if children are encouraged to write a paragraph of information to go with "R is for rain forest," for example.

Grover, Max. Accidental Zucchini: An Unexpected Alphabet. Harcourt Brace, 1993.
Hunt, Jonathan. Illuminations. Bradbury, 1989.
Jacques, Brian. Redwall. Illustrated by Gary Chalk. Philomel, 1986.
Marsalis, Winton. Jazz A.B.Z. Illustrated by Paul Rogers. Candlewick Press, 2005.

The collection of World Wide Web resources related to picture books is growing rapidly. More and more authors and illustrators have personal websites that they have developed themselves or that have been developed for them by their publishers. Additionally, sites that have been developed by fans exist for authors and illustrators. Detailed information about authors' and illustrators' lives, artistic process, and publications is only a click of the mouse away. This wealth of readily available information opens up tremendous possibilities for student projects related to picture books. Students might create multimedia projects presenting the work of a single picture book author or illustrator or comparing the work of several artists. Students could create a web-based scavenger hunt (or webquest) for their classmates. The web is also a resource that children might use to create thematic bibliographies or book recommendation lists. The possibilities are endless.

Explore the Principles of Picture Book Design
Children's book author/illustrator Molly Bang invites readers of her book Picture This: How Pictures Work to consider how shape, line, color, and layout express meaning in picture book illustration. Share this book with students and then invite them to experiment with different shapes, colors, and layout to create an illustration for a piece of their own writing. Molly Bang provides specific guidance on how to use the space on the page to optimize the affective power of pictures. Students can use her recommendations as a resource to create their own expressive works.