Pistes d'exploration

Locate New York City on a map and share prior knowledge and personal experiences.

Use a graphic organizer to compare facts about New York with facts about a Canadian city (landmarks, attractions, statistics, history).

Based on information in the book, plan an itinerary for a weekend visit to New York City. Outline the top five attractions you would like to visit. Use an online mapping app or software to plan your schedule and a logical route. Refer to the resources at the back of the book for more information.

On a picture walk, explore the setting and make a class list of elements (types of buildings, landmarks, streets. etc.). Sort the setting words into categories to put in a graphic organizer. Explain your organization choices.

Look up a city map of New York. Identify where the landmarks from the book are located. With a partner, practice giving directions from one place to another.

Compare facts about New York to facts about your own town or city. Describe them in a similar style.

In small groups, create pages about your city or town in the same style. Include interesting landmarks, viewpoints and spaces (commercial, learning, sports). Assemble the pages and make copies to give to city hall, a visitor or as a memento for someone moving away.

Share experiences of visits to New York. Why is it considered one of the more exciting cities in the world? What sites and features make it unique? Discuss whether you would like to live there or not, and why.

Prepare a statistics fact sheet based on what you learned about New York city. Include information found in the endpapers. Compare the information with that about your own town or city.

Pretend you are a tourist visiting New York city. Write a postcard to a friend telling him or her about your trip. Design your postcard by referring to the illustrations. (Core)

Write a letter to a friend or family member recommending places to visit based on their likes and interests. (EESL)

Madlenka

Mots-clés

Non-fiction , first-person narration , geography , narrative non-fiction , New York City , travel , United States

Commentaire descriptif

Written in a friendly, first-person voice, the book gives a glimpse of a long-ago agrarian New Amsterdam – chickens clucking amid garden rows while a shepherd guides baaing sheep up the main street. From there, it launches into a colourful, fact-filled guided tour of the city we now call New York. The text is studded with the kind of “biggest, tallest, most-ist” facts children love: the Empire State Building – with its 102 floors – is struck by lightning about 100 times a year; the city’s subway system has 6 300 subway cars; traffic-filled streets host over 23 000 restaurants. Full-page hand-drawn illustrations present vivid views of New York, including the ship-filled rivers encircling the city, the natural history museum, skaters at Rockefeller Center and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The images, including those on the book’s endpapers, beckon the reader to pick out funny details and linger on each page. Closing pages present a list of sites (with addresses and URLs) depicted in the book and offer even more: museums, entertainment, places to shop and how to get around the city.