Analysing picture books: Out of the Egg
Focus texts
Out of the Egg by Tina Matthews
Text Type
Picture Book
Learning intention
Students are learning to:
- Respond to visual texts
- Analyse the use of visual techniques in a picture book and the impact on readers
- Understand the role of texts, such as picture books, in society
- Write creatively
Success criteria
Students will be successful when they can:
- Make connections between the world of the text and the real world
- Use and understand the impact of visual techniques such as colour
- Think creatively and critically to respond to a picture book
NSW Syllabus for the Australian Curriculum English K-10
Outcomes
A student:
EN4-RVL-01 uses a range of personal, creative and critical strategies to read texts that are complex in their ideas and construction
EN4-URA-01 analyses how meaning is created through the use of and response to language forms, features and structures
EN4-ECB-01 uses processes of planning, monitoring, revising and reflecting to support and develop composition of texts
Content
Students
EN4-RVL-01
- Explore the main ideas and thematic concerns posed by a text for meaning
- Engage with the ways texts contain layers of meaning, or multiple meanings
- Understand the ways reading helps us understand ourselves and make connections to others and to the world
EN4-URA-01
- Use appropriate metalanguage to describe how meaning is constructed through linguistic and stylistic elements in texts
- Understand how language forms, features and structures, in a variety of texts, vary according to context, purpose and audience, and demonstrate this understanding through written, spoken, visual and multimodal responses
- Analyse how figurative language and devices can represent ideas, thoughts and feelings to communicate meaning
EN4-ECB-01
- Engage with the features and structures of model texts to plan and consider implications for own text creation
- Reflect on own composition of texts, using appropriate technical vocabulary to explain choices of language and structure in line with the target audience and intended purpose
- Describe the pleasures, challenges and successes experienced in the processes of understanding and composing texts
- Consider how purposeful compositional choices are influenced by specific elements of model texts
Text requirements
Across the stage, the selection of texts must give students experience of:
- a wide range of literary texts from other countries and times, including poetry, drama scripts, prose fiction and picture books
- texts that include aspects of environmental and social sustainability
- nonfiction, picture books, graphic novels
LAC
Sustainability
Critical and creative thinking
Literacy
Student Activities
Activity 1
Analysing Colour
Activity 2
Symbolism
Activity 3
Representing change
Activity 4
What next
Background information
Tina Matthews is an author and illustrator. Her first book, Out of the Egg, was published in 2007. It is the story of a hen, a seed and a little chick – inspired by the old story of The Little Red Hen, but with a new ending for a new generation. The illustrations were created using woodblock prints. This involves drawing the picture on paper then transferring it to a woodblock, carving the picture out of the wood, inking it, then printing it. All preliminary sketches, drafts, woodblocks and the final artworks for the illustrations are held in the State Library’s collection.
Source list for illustrations
All woodblock illustrations in this learning activity were created by Tina Matthews for the picture book 'Out of the Egg' published in 2007 by both Walker Books Australia and Houghton Mifflin Books.