Family Pictures / Cuadros de Familias

This book is an excellent resource for teachers. After reading this book to them, I had them write about one of their family traditions. THis book really inspired their creative writing skills! Many students could relate to some of the traditions in this story. It made them feel special and it caused a lot of verbal interaction between students. It made the students want to learn about each other's cultures!

This book is a must have for ALL classrooms, but especially Bilingual and Dual Language Classrooms! I use it all year long! My students LOVE it so much that I bought them each their own copy for Día del niño this year. We use it as a writing prompt, they connect text to self and compare and contrast. The illustrations are beautiful. This year we used it for our yearly diorama project. Instead of the children choosing random books to do a diorama on, they chose the cuadro that most spoke to them and their family experience, and did their diorama on that. They also did a beautiful piece of polished writing comparing a family memory with that cuadro. This is my favorite book to use in the classroom, and many adults love to receive it as a gift as well. It brings back beautiful memories to all ages. This is truly a treasure. I cannot reccomend it highly enough! It is also great to leave for a substitute because it is bilingual and you know you cannot count on all subs speaking Spanish! The students never get tired of reading it or writing about it! A MUST BUY!

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.

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.

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.