Picturing America for Public Libraries

We had two programs where we used the posters. One was focused on art, specifically giving the students the opportunity to use charcoal as an artistic medium. We used the posters of structures to serve as the subject of the students' first charcoal drawings. They picked a poster and copied the drawings on a smaller scale into their notebooks. They then wrote a few sentences about how the particular buildings or structures made them feel and why they think buildings can inspire deep feelings in humans. Our Homeschool Hour program also used the posters when we were discussing Native Americans. There were several posters that helped us launch a discussion on Native American rights now and during the early years of our country. This supplemented the craft and Powerpoint that we already had in place for this program.
We hung two of the posters from trapezes in our Youth Services area of the library. We rotated these posters every few months. Patrons liked seeing the artwork and asked about them a lot. We were happy to direct them to the Picturing America website for additional information about the program.

Submitted by Suzanne Davis