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Blog #4- Picture Books

Flotsam by David Weisner- This week, I chose to read Flotsam, a completely wordless book that depends on the pictures to tell the story. I chose this book based on a listing from our text. For starters, I had to define what flotsam was to understand the book. If I were to read this book (or "show" in this case), it would be imperative that students understood the definition of the title to help build the context of the images in the book. Because this book has no text, the meaning of the pictures would be left up to the reader. The photos in the book does make the book easily to follow and decode; therefore, I would definitely qualify this book as a good picture book because it gets no "picturey" than this! The pictures and the setting help establish a mood, as suggested in our text.

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; Pictures by Clement Hurd- Contrary to what many may believe, this was my first time reading Goodnight Moon. I have seen the book plenty of times throughout my years, but I never recall reading it or having it read aloud to me. After reading it, I was actually taken aback by its simplicity. The book is literally naming different things and telling them "goodnight". The photos help tell the story because it is adding meaning to the words. If a reader did not know what object the author was referencing, they could simply grasp it by looking at the pictures. This would qualify as a great picture book for beginning readers because they can point out the object as they read along. This is a strong indication that the illustration relates to the text in a meaningful way. However, I would say the quality of the text can be more developed as it just simply states "goodnight" to the smallest little objects that may not be common to some readers.

 Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak- Another "classic" that I seemed to miss. This book literally allows the reader to get lost just by using their imagination just like the main character, Max. Max uses his imagination to sail into this "wild" world. While there, he has a stranger encounter with "wild things". When he is done on his "adventure", he sails back into his room where his mother has his dinner hot & ready, and seems as if he never left. The pictures in this book compliment the words well. For example, thing "wild things" had yellow eyes, and the pictures in the book depicted those yellow eyes. 


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