Description

Explore visual and grammatical perspectives through The Garden of Broken Things by Freya Blackwood – a powerful picture book that offers rich opportunities to teach shot angles and descriptive language.

This lesson plan is designed to explicitly teach students how visual shot angles (high-shot, low-shot, and eye-level) can shape messages, and how adjectives, when used as Describers in a noun group, contribute to meaning.

Through analysis of both image and text, students investigate how Freya Blackwood use visual techniques to position the viewer and how carefully chosen adjectives develop the setting. The text’s gentle treatment of renewal and change offers a meaningful context in which to explore these language and visual concepts.

Aligned with Version 9 of the Australian Curriculum: English for Years 1–6, this lesson provides a scaffolded approach for teaching visual literacy and grammar through literature. It supports students in noticing and naming author and illustrator choices, and using those techniques in their own texts.

The lesson plan includes:

Step-by-step teacher instructions for an intentional and scaffolded learning sequence
Modelling prompts to support classroom discussion and guided analysis
A shared group experience to build collective understanding
Independent practice tasks to consolidate learning
A reflective activity to encourage synthesis
2 printable resources to support the lesson

Grounded in the gradual release of responsibility model and the deconstructing–reconstructing approach of the teaching and learning cycle, this lesson is ideal for building students’ visual literacy, grammar knowledge, and appreciation for multimodal texts.