Interpreting the images in a picture book: Students make connections to themselves, their lives and experiences

Picture books are an important and accessible form of visual art for children because they offer, among other things, opportunities for making connections to personal experiences and to the values and beliefs of families and communities. This paper reports on the use of a picture book to promote Year 4 students' making of text-to-self connections, which they expressed through visual art. A funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) lens was used to analyse the representation of students' out-of-school lives and experiences within the artworks. In this paper, we argue for a pedagogical approach that creates opportunities for children to respond to picture books through visual art, identifying artworks as powerful avenues of insight into children's funds of knowledge that can inform literacy pedagogy.