Cuadros de familia / Family Pictures

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Summary: Teachers must have this book!
Review: Family Pictures is a book within our third grade anthology, and it is definitely worth buying. This book is an excellent example of an autobiography or personal experience narrative for students to read while using background knowledge to make schema connections of all kinds, especially text to self connections. Students will use the author's detailed illustrations and text to predict, question, infer, and synthesize. I was so impressed by this book, that I bought the author's other book called In My Family, and found it to be an excellent sequel for text to text connections with Family Pictures. My class used the book Family Pictures to create our own classroom book of family pictures using the author's craft to guide our own photo summaries. This activity incorporates not only the use of elaborative detail, but teaches the skill of summarizing by using the 5 W's: (who, what, when, where, why). Text to text connections may also be made relating this book to Too Many Tamales and When I Was Young in the Mountains.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful piece!
Review: Family Pictures is an excellent example of an autobiographical as well as multicultural book written for children from kindergarten through fourth grade. Lomas Garza covers a short period of her own childhood and the social life and customs of Hispanic Americans. The reader's attention is held by the detailed illustrations done in a variety of materials including oil on canvas, acrylic on canvas, and gouache on arches paper. While children will be drawn by the wonderful paintings, they will be learning a great deal about the Hispanic culture.

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Summary: A great story about a family being together.
Review: I like it because the illustration are great beacause the family is together. I like how she is an arthor and illustrator and I also liked that family pictures is her favorite book. I like her writing because it is clear and good and there are no mistakes. I reccommend this book to other kids.