Picture book
Lesson 3
Illustrating your big question
Introduction
In this lesson you will narrow down and select the images that work best to illustrate your big question.
You will apply the skills of illustrating that you've been developing to bring your images to life, and get some feedback.
Watch the video for an introduction to the lesson.
Understanding the tasks
Rating the tasks
This lesson contains a few activities. Each activity will have one or more tasks. These tasks have been given a rating.
Some of the tasks in this lesson are must do. These are important to help you understand the introductory ideas or skills.
Have a go at the should do tasks and reach out to your friends or teacher if you need some advice. These will usually take a bit longer to complete than must do tasks.
Could do tasks will probably take you some extra time and might need you to get creative or problem solve. We strongly encourage you to try these.
Activity 1 - Choosing images to illustrate your big question
Task 1 - Finalising your big question
By now you have seen a number of big questions from the book 'How many mice make an elephant?'. In Literacy lesson 2 you have explored big questions and how to develop them. In Numeracy lesson 2 you learnt how to calculate the answers to big questions.
As you were completing these activities, you would have been thinking about your own big question. You probably have a number of good ideas but now is the time to decide on the one big question that you will use in your double page spread.
Remember to choose a big question that you have an interest in and can confidently illustrate.
Task 2 - Illustrating your big question brainstorm
Start by brainstorming some images you could use to illustrate your big question.
Only use images that your target audience would be familiar with and can relate to!
Make sure the images you collect are ones you can actually draw (illustrate)!
Review your brainstorm and identify your top 2-3 ideas that you will use for your illustration.
Use the Illustrating your big question brainstorm Google Slides template to complete this activity.
Click on the image to open a new tab and view the Google Slides.
Click on the Use Template button to create a copy for you to edit.
Hint: Images that are likely to have the highest impact, while still being simple to illustrate, will be the best for this project.
Activity 2 - Bringing your images to life
Task 1 - Illustrating your big question
Apply the visual design elements learnt in Lesson 2 to illustrate your big question. Depending on your big question theme, you will need to use different visual design elements to communicate size, distance or number.
Your illustration may be a combination of images.
You can complete this task on:
paper
Microsoft Paint 3D
Google Slides
Apple Keynote
Or any other digital tool of your choice.
Allow 30 minutes for this task.
Task 2 - Explain your design choices
Explain your design choices using the interactive Design Elements activity.
Click on the question mark symbol inside the interactive to get the specific instructions for each element.
When you have finished, use the blue Copy button to extract the text and paste it into a Word or Google Doc, ready to share with your teacher.
Activity 3 - Refining your illustrations
Task 1 - MAS feedback
An important part of the design process is getting feedback at different stages of development.
Show your illustration to someone else for feedback.
Explain how you have used the visual design elements.
Ask them to critique the image from the point of view of the target audience.
Use the MAS feedback Google Slides template to guide your discussion and record the feedback you get.
Click on the image to open a new tab and view the Google Slides.
Click on the Use Template button to create a copy for you to edit.
Task 2 - Iterative design
Spend time refining your illustration based on the feedback you received.
Good design uses an "iterative" process - this means making a product, testing it and getting feedback, then making changes to improve it. And then testing it again. The more times this happens, the more refined the product will become.
Try to take on as much of the feedback as you can, and make changes to your product. Then, you can show your audience again.
Task 3 - A picture tells a thousand words
For each of the images below, formulate a possible big question the image could be trying to communicate.
For example, this could be a question about size or volume of populations
Could this image prompt a question about framerates in a film?
Does this image portray scale and distance?
Handing in your work
Don't forget to hand in the work you completed today!
Your teacher will have told you to do one of the following:
Upload any digital documents you created and any photos you took of your written work to your Learning Management system (MS Teams, Google Classroom for example).
Email any digital documents you created and any photos you took of your written work to your teacher.
Make sure you keep any handwritten work you did in your exercise book or folder as your teacher may need to see these when you are back in class.
Banner image from How many mice make an elephant? (c) Pan Macmillan. Used with permission.