The authors share how, through reading, writing, and art experiences around picturebooks, children learned to read and communicate multimodally through art and written language and also grew as critical thinkers.The pictures explained the story a little more. Like in the biking picture it didn't mention in the book that they were going so fast but in the illustration it did. And I looked at the words too. Sometimes I didn't know what something was in the illustrations, and it explained it in the words. (Allie) Prisca Martens is a professor at

Learn how to use global literature to help students understand their personal cultural identities, their responsibility to take action in their worlds, and how to express these understandings in art.

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The purpose of this article is to share how the authors supported kindergartners’ and first graders’ developing creativity through stories they composed in writing and art. Over eight years, the authors explored ways to use picturebooks as mentor texts to help students explore how the authors and artists create meaning multimodally. This article shares minilessons and examples of how students creatively and imaginatively told their stories; learned to think, see, and reason; and invented and problem solved their stories, seamlessly weaving their meanings into writing and art.