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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: wordless picture book, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 5 of 5
1. Review – How Long is a Piece of String? by Madeleine Meyer

Where do dogs wander to in the dark of night? How tall is a ladder to an exotic land? Will unusual creatures help guide you to your destination? How long is a piece of string? Don’t know the answers? Well, it’s all up to your imagination!   In similarity to those that leave the stories […]

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2. Review: Animals Home Alone

AnimalsHomeAlone Review: Animals Home AloneAnimals Home Alone by Loes Riphagen

Review by Chris Singer

About the author (translated from Dutch from the author's website):

Loes Riphagen is a Dutch author from Oene, a small farming village in the Veluwe. She graduated in 2007 at the Art Academy in Rotterdam. Loes debuted in 2008 as a children's author and illustrator of the picture book Bedroom Nocturnal animals (the fountain). With her cheerful and cheeky illustrations Loes Riphagen falls on the public, the press and various juries. For her illustrations in the book house beestenboel (Fountain), it Flag and Pennant 2010 and receive the book Bedroom Nocturnal animals, she was nominated for the children's retail 2009/2010. Superheldjes (Fountain) is even elected core title of the Children 2011. Currently lives and works in Rotterdam Loes.

About the book (from Amazon.com):

Part picture book, part game, and all fun, Animals Home Alone, introduces readers to fifteen animals who begin to act in unusual ways when the humans are away. In wordless pages, each animal finds a unique activity or bit of mischief to get into. At the book's conclusion, readers are asked questions about what the animals have done.

My take on the book:

We discovered Animals Gone Home on our most recent visit to the library. When they're well done, I really enjoy wordless picture books and we've discovered a few lately which have been big hits in our home so we decided to check this one out.

Animals Gone Home is part book, part game and a lot of laughs. The illustrations are so cute and quirky and they have had my daughter laughing out loud and squealing with delight. Each page gives readers a hilarious view of what happens when families leave the animals alone at home.

Today, while Tessa was supposed to be napping, I could hear her laughing. When I opened the door to her room, she was sitting in the corner in her little rocking chair, leafing through the pages of Animals Gone Home and just having the time of her life!

I'm not sure I've ever seen my daughter enjoy a book more (and that's saying a lot!). What's been so much fun for us is that we can tell a different story each time we "read" it. Tessa is about to turn 3 and I get such a thrill listening to her tell me what's going on in the pictures. We've literally sat and poured over the pictures and telling and retelling for an hour at a time. The best part is that neither of us have grown tired of it yet!

huisbeesten2 Review: Animals Home Alone

 

 

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3. Octopus Soup by Mercer Mayer (Perfect for 6 + 1 Traits!)

Today we are talking about the new, pretty-much WORDLESS, book from Mercer Mayer. But don’t forget to enter the giveaway for Meredith Zeitlin’s YA book Freshman Year and Other Unnatural Disasters and check out her book trailer here.

Now. . .Octopus Soup

*Picture book for preschoolers through third graders (really any level if you see my activities)
*A poor little octopus as the main character
*Rating: I love wordless books for all the opportunities they provide. My 16-month-old daughter sat STILL while I shared these illustrations with her and told her what was going on! Octopus Soup is a winner!

Short, short summary:

Told like a comic book strip with no words, this is the story of a little octopus who goes on an adventure by hitching a ride on a fishing boat. He winds up in a restaurant where the chef starts thinking, OCTOPUS SOUP! This causes a major chase through the streets to the dock, where the chef THINKS he has his octopus. But luckily the little guy has law enforcement on his side! When the octopus gets back into the ocean, his parents are super happy!

So what do I do with this book?

1. VOICE– You can do so many 6 + 1 traits of writing activities with this book. You can do VOICE. Let students write and give the characters a voice. What is the little octopus thinking/saying? How about the chef? What about the parents in the end? How about the lady shopping for melons? And so on. Students can write in paragraph or sentence form depending on their age. They can even write dialogue and practice punctuation.

2. WORD CHOICE–pick a page and tell what is going on. Concentrate on word choice when writing descriptions or even emotions of the characters. The students can use ANY WORDS THEY WANT because the story is there, but Mercer Mayer hasn’t put any words in their head yet (except maybe the ones in the illustrations!) Challenge students to come up with different words to describe the octopus, the soup, the ocean, and so on.

3. SENTENCE FLUENCY–Again, since there are no words, students (in shared writing or on their own) can write the story. Work on telling the story with sentences that start different ways or are varying lengths. This is the PERFECT sentence fluency, 6 + 1 traits lesson!

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4. Where’s Walrus? by Stephen Savage

*Wordless picture book for preschool through 2nd graders
*Walrus as main character
*Rating: Where’s Walrus? by Stephen Savage is a cute book that tells a complete story without any words.

Short, short summary:

Walrus is on an adventure of a lifetime, and the zookeeper can’t keep up with him. When Walrus escapes and is being chased, he eats in a diner, lays some brick, puts out a fire, and more. In the end, he enters a diving competition, and he is quite good! The zookeeper realizes that he may have quite the performer on hand. :)

So, what do I do with this book?

1. I love wordless books for writing exercises for children. Let them provide the text and create a class book with their own illustrations, modeled after Stephen Savage’s!

2. Wordless books are also great for practicing writing dialogue, putting in the quotation marks, and so on. What would the zookeeper say to the Walrus? What would the diving judges say? You can do this as a shared writing activity or have students practice on their own or in small groups.

3. Where could Walrus hide in your city? At your school? In your students’ neighborhood? In your child’s room? Discuss this with students, and then they can create their own page to go with this book! Have fun!

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5. Bee & Bird

Bee & Bird started as a personal assignment to create a book that was extremely graphic and bold. That is not a stretch as my illustrations are pretty graphic to begin with. I decided that the best way to get there was to design a story with a few elements and draw them as sparingly as possible. In essence, the book was an exercise in cropping and point-of-view. Each page attempting to describe a scene with the slightest hint of the upcoming scene—be it a corner of a truck or a peek at a red bird’s head. These are clues that the parent and child can have a dialogue about what they think is next. In the course of designing the story, Neal Porter (my editor) and I decided that the elimination of words would lend itself to making a story that would be unique to each reader.

I happen to love super simple visuals, perhaps a throwback to my early years as a designer when Swiss design was in style. These illustrations are reduced to the fewest elements and created very graphically with straight lines and sensual radiused corners—almost architectural. I’m a real sketcher and work very small in my sketchbooks.

 Perhaps a reaction to the computer, they were all drawn with drafting tools and scanned retaining the pens fuzzy edge and colored with primary colors.  

The actual illustrating took several months and lots of redraws until all the illustrations were consistently drawn in the same vocabulary. I have learned from my years as a designer to trust the sense of scale and proportion that I work out in my thumbnails, it’s always the same whether designing a poster or a postage stamp.

 

 

 



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