Educator Resources

If you want to incorporate Illustrated Memoir work into your ELL classroom some of the resources on this page can help. The most important elements of this project are time and respect. Telling our stories can’t be rushed. And we as educators should not impose our ideas of what a story looks like or sounds like on students. Everyone has a different story to tell and their own unique way of telling it. Please respect your students’ choices and support them in however they choose to share their experience and knowledge of the world.

Storyboard Template

The storyboard takes a story from a single written document to a plan for a book. It is a big conceptual step. Once a story is written it can be divided up into sections that seem like they should live on a page together. Number these sections, then layout those written sections with sketches for planned illustrations. The completed storyboard is your map for the work ahead and a guide for assembling the completed memoir.

Examples of illustrations from different countries

I have put together some slide shows you can use showing examples of work by artists from diverse cultures and countries. I think these can help give students some ideas about various approaches to take when starting to create images for books.

Examples of Collage

Sometimes memoir project participants will want to use existing images in their illustrations in the form of photographs or images from magazines. When that is the case I encourage them to consider making the image their own by incorporating it into a collage. The slideshow linked shows a variety of examples.