Follow-up Guide for Picture Day Perfection

Don’t let this silly face on the Picture Day Perfection cover fool you in any way. Author Deb Diesen’s hilarious book is picture perfect to teach advanced elements of story and that’s just what we did in a follow-up guide crafted for grades 3 to 5. This book, pared with the attached guide, will make teaching the complicated (and sometimes kind of - yawn - boring) topic of elements of story fun, as well as unforgettable!

Practice comprehending literary terms with Picture Day Perfection Bingo.This guide is rich with literary terminology such as rising and falling action, exposition, climax, resolution, and aspects of the three act structure. Being that Picture Day Perfection’s intriguing circular plot line has such a clever twist at the end; students of all ages will delight in returning to the text with the intent of connecting the action on the page to the classic story arc.  And, for the ultimate opportunity to practice the application of skills, students can participate in a Readers’ Theatre production. The script is divided into specific acts and scenes, all correlating with the elevated concepts presented in the guide.

I have to say that creating two age-appropriate guides for the same book was a fascinating experience. We went from sequencing the months of the year in the proper ordinal pattern to chatting it up using high-level literary lingo.  Please take a moment to download the guide and see what I mean.

Featured Guide of the Week - Picture Day Perfection

Deb Diesen is the queen of the plot twist! In her Picture Day Perfection, we’re riding along with our sullen protagonist on his way to the photographer’s stool, even feeling a little bit sorry for the messy mix-ups this kid is enduring, to discover that he had it all planned out – perfectly! That little twit. He had me right where he wanted me the whole time. 

Not only did Deb craft a clever tale, Dan Santat’s illustrations kept me smiling with each page turn. Y’all, this book is straight up funny! If you’ve got a kooky kid in your life, this one’s for them. Get it. They’ll love it. And, if you’re hoping to lead said kooky kid into a deeper study of foundational skills in literature, download the guide. Strike while enthusiasm is hot, right?

Along with series of pre and post reading discussion questions, the guide presents writing and illustrating prompts, a study of adjectives (which Deb highlights masterfully in the text), a calendar/sequential numeric activity, and a super fun construction paper photography craft that I just have to tell you about.

I have a passion for making quirky, inexpensive kiddie crafts. Give me some tape, construction paper, and a sunny afternoon and watch me go! And, that’s just what I did with an activity for this Picture Day Perfection guide. The catch is, though, I don’t live in Texas anymore, where the sun shines brightly almost every day of the year. No. I live in Michigan now, where gun-metal grey skies dominate the calendar. This change in locale made the processing portion of this project a little bit more challenging.

When you download the guide, you’ll see that sunshine is a key procedure element and, when I was making a sample for the guide, I couldn’t find any! I chased whatever rays I could find by taping and retaping the ‘photo’ to just about every window all around the house.  My husband cracked up when he pulled up after work to find this fellow taped on the picture window facing our front lawn, for the entire world to see!

What will the neighbors think, right? We decided that they’d better get used to it.

Download the guide here and see what I mean. I hope you have as much fun with the projects as I did making them.