The Last American Rainforest written by Shelley Gill and Shannon Cartwright is a picture book that follows a grandmother and her granddaughter in their quest to find spruce roots to harvest for hat making. The setting is the Tongass National Rainforest. The imagery written accompanies the painting in such a way that pairs like fine wine and cheese. We have imagery that is developed to give the readers a clear picture of the flora and fauna in the area, as well as the development of logging and clearcutting.
The book could easily be used in an English classroom. Like I had mentioned earlier, a lesson could be built off of the way that the imagery is written, or even how the dialogue is written.
Gill, Shelley. Tongass, The Last American Rainforest. Sasquatch Books. 1997.
I have an idea regarding the use of imagery in an English lesson. Its based off something I did in high school. We were comparing the transcendentalist (Ts) and anti-transcendentalist (ATs) writing styles and we wrote short stories one in the short concise style of the ATs and then we tried to double the length of the same story just by adding imagery and details to make it more similar to the Ts. You can have students do something similar by having them rewrite children’s stories with details and imagery to replace the illustrations. You could then pair that with an art class and have students illustrate their classmates writing trying to capture the imagery another classmate was trying to convey in writing.
That is the same book that Jerry posted! Are you guys copying each other? I’m telling Angie. J/k. As I commented in Jerry’s post I love the title but it should be changed “The Last American Forest”.