Pistes d'exploration

Read the inside and outside covers. As you read the pictures, predict what will happen next in the story.

Tell the story with a friend or small group; take turns so everyone makes a contribution.

Using one of the pictures, write a poem describing the scene.

Make a wordless picture book using photos or your own drawings. Have someone from your class write the story and compare your ideas with theirs.

Read the inside and outside covers, and look at the pictures inside the book. Talk about what is happening in the pictures.

Using the pictures, make a class chart with the characters, setting, storyline and sequence of events in the book.

Write the story of the boy at the beach. Use your chart (see above) and resources.

Make a wordless picture book using photos or pictures from magazines and newspapers.

Consider how wordless books express a story through images alone and how they provide opportunities to work with vocabulary that is already familiar to readers.

During a picture walk, complete an alpha box with words related to the story.

Create a comic strip that captures the most important elements of the story. Be sure to use the words from your alpha box.

Holland, Free Fall, It's a Snap!: George Eastman's First Photograph, Fossil

Mots-clés

Adventure , Picture book , character , comic strips , discovery , graphic tale , oceans , photography , point of view , setting , structures and features , wordless book

Commentaire descriptif

On a family holiday at the shore, a boy examines ocean creatures with his magnifying glass and microscope. On finding an antique underwater camera, with film inside, he rushes into town for new film and to develop the old roll. Realistic illustrations employ sun-washed tones for a lovingly depicted Jersey Shore landscape. The detailed realism serves beautifully for fantastical underwater scenes taken by the old camera: an octopus lounges in a castoff easy chair; whales swim through the legs of giant, waving sea stars. Even readers who love words will be immersed in this exclusively graphic tale, as the boy discovers the last picture on the roll: a girl holding a photo of a boy holding a photo of another child and so on. With his magnifying glass, then microscope, our hero manages to view all the antecedent images, back to the very first, where, on a beach much like his own, a boy in knee-breeches waves at him through the generations. Image has become message, passing across time and around the oceans of the world. In a touching finish about communication and continuity, the boy takes his own self-portrait with this final photo, and hurls the camera back into the sea.