Title: Flotsam
Author and Illustrator: David Wiesner
About the author: The author, David Wiesner has created a book for children to explore and use their own imaginations. He finds interest in visual storytelling, which dates back to his high school days. He was inspired by silent movies and wordless comic books. He has won many Caldecott Medals. Along with writing and illustrating his own picture books, he is also an illustrator for other children’s authors.
Genre: Fiction
Age Levels: 5-8 years old
Synopsis: This is a wordless picture book. It is the story of a boy who goes to the beach. He is prepared to find any “flotsam- something that floats.” When he finds a camera, he develops the film. He finds many surprises and secrets.
Pre-Reading Activities: This would be a great book to use for predicting a story. Students would do an in-depth picture walk. I would have students view every page and make predictions on what the story would be about. Since there are no words they would have a great opportunity to predict what the story could be about.
Post-Reading Activities: I think a great activity would be to create words to go with the pictures for each page. This would be a great opportunity for a writing activity. I would put students in groups or pairs. Then I would ask them to create a story for the pictures. I think this would be so interesting to see how each group of students story comes out. I feel like the stories would be so different! I think that the students would enjoy viewing each other's stories and noticing the similarities and differences.
My Reflection: I thought this book was so interesting. I liked that it had no words! You have to be creative and really pay attention to the details of the pictures to figure out the story. I also think that you have to have an imagination and be creative in order to "read" this book! I also think that this book would be great for students with learning disabilities. This book would give those students the chance to "read" a book with out struggling to read words. They can view the pictures and get a sense of the story rather than focusing so much on reading and losing the meaning of the story because they are so focused on sounding out words and decoding.
Work Cited:
Barnes and Noble
When you presented this in class and we worked on it together, I thought it was really confusing at first because it seemed like it kept going in reverse. Thinking more about it though, it would give the students the concept of time and how it passes. One thing you could have them do is take pictures of different things as they go throughout the school year, kind of like a time capsule. It would be fun for the kids to get involved with something like this and they could get really creative with the pictures.
ReplyDeleteI agree, this book was a little confusing. Honestly, I really didn't like this book. However, I love the lessons that you can use with this book and the pictures are beautiful. I love your time capsule idea! Great idea!
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