Pistes d'exploration

Discuss and define the term quest. What significance might the image on the front endpapers have in the story?

What is the purpose of the map on page nine? How does the author use colour and symbols throughout the story to help you understand the plot?

What do you think happened in the kingdom before the start of the story? Draw a picture or series of pictures in the same style as the book to explain what came before.

Go for a picture walk and discuss the settings, characters and quest.

Discuss how the map on page 9 is organized. What do you think it means?

Discuss the role of colour in this story.

Create and record an audio script that would describe the children’s quest. Add sounds to your podcast.

Along with other fantasy texts, this wordless narrative can be used in a genre study or as part of the immersion in text prior to the production of your own fantasy narratives.

Who is the hero of this story? How do you know?

In a small group, identify the elements of the hero’s quest in this and other texts. Make notes in a reader-writer notebook for future narrative productions that incorporate elements of fantasy.

Journey

Mots-clés

Adventure , Picture book , art , colours , friendship , imaginary creatures , imaginary world , magic , wordless book

Commentaire descriptif

Young gamers and fantasy fans alike will appreciate the careful logic behind the sequence of events in this gorgeous picture book. Two friends find themselves tasked with a quest by the deposed king of another world, and they have only a map, their coloured crayons and their bird companion to aid them. Detailed panoramas depict kingdoms, flying machines, mountain chasms and more. The young heroes use their imaginations (and crayons) to draw creatures and contraptions for assistance against oppressive military forces. Colour provides the key to the children’s quest. Working from the colour-map given them by the prisoner-king, the young friends find the yellow crayon glowing in a murky, underwater ruin. They draw an elephant and howdah to take them to the green crayon, deep in a tropical jungle. In the end, the message of creativity as a source of enlightenment is skillfully conveyed as the bird carries the full spectrum of gathered crayons, making a rainbow that topples the soldiers and restores the kingdom to its rightful place in the light. Showing how the effects of our good actions follow us, when the children return to our world, they find the rainbow is here too.