Jason Loh, an experienced primary school teacher and a teacher educator, discovered a powerful way of using pictures with children's spoken and listening vocabulary to build their reading and writing vocabulary. The transformative moment for the writer occurred during his secondment to the sole, teacher-training institute of Singapore, the National Institute of Education, during an encounter with a Canadian colleague. That encounter prompted a decision to utilise this learning strategy, the Picture-Word Inductive Model (PWIM), in his lower primary class when he returned to the school system. This narrative relates his experiences as he used PWIM in his primary 1 class in a new school, and the resistance he met as a result.