When we read a book, we're always just looking at two pages at a time. A panel book makes it easy to focus on each page individually and in any order.

To create a panel book, you disassemble a book into its individual pages. One of the main uses for a panel book is to help introduce a storyboarding activity or prepare for a multimedia, animation, or video project. You can also use it for reading aloud when you want to more closely examine and discuss issues of sequence, graphics and storytelling.

Recommended Time

Making the panel book takes about half an hour. You can use it in class for discussions of almost any length.

Goals

• To explore the elements of storytelling
• To explore the interplay of graphics and pictures in a story
• To explore sequencing in a story

Materials and Equipment

• Three copies of a book that uses pictures to tell its story, preferably a somewhat oversized book, such as Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.
• Construction paper or poster board large enough to form a frame around each page of the book on all sides. You need one sheet of paper or poster board for each individually numbered page of the book.
• Tape or glue stick.

Creating the Panel Book

Set one copy of the book aside. Take the other two copies and remove the pages. You need two copies in order to get the pages that are printed front to back. Now take the pages you cut out, and paste or tape each to a sheet of the paper or poster board. (Trim the boards if you like, but leave a frame of at least an inch around the book pages on all sides.) You can keep each sheet separate and tape it to the wall in the classroom, or tape the sheets together, end to end, to form a folding accordion. The latter form can be handy if you want to hide certain pages.

Using the Panel Book in Class

Tape the panel book pages to the wall in sequence. Using your third copy of the book, read the story aloud to the class as you normally would so that everyone knows it. You can now go on to a storyboarding activity or begin an open discussion about particular elements of the story.

Try some of the following ideas:

• Step through the panel book aloud, page by page. When finished, ask the kids what questions they have about the text, in any order, interweaving your own questions about the book, pictures and story. For example, did you ever notice that, in Where the Wild Things Are, the pictures start out small in the beginning of the book, grow larger with the adventure, then smaller again when Max returns to his room? It's something that's much more apparent when you see the book as panels.
• Remove a page or two from the sequence and talk about what happens to the story. Can you still understand it?
• Compare different pages that have similar activity in them. How are the text and pictures different or the same?
• Look for patterns in the story: Do certain things happen when a particular character appears? Look for patterns in the illustrations separate from the words.
• Take a particular page and see what questions it makes the kids think of.
• Cover the page numbers and mix them all up. Now try to put them back together in order as a group.