Journey

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We’d tell a story together as a class with yoga cards and poses. We would read books with yoga poses built in. Before sharing the whole book, play ‘picture detectives’ to prepare your class for the kind of story-and-image questioning that will help them enjoy this tale.

Look at the different characters in the story. Can you create your own illustrations of them? This video has some tips from the author / illustrator: The children may already be familiar with Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.Read the beginning of the story together What emotions do you think the girl is feeling? How can we tell? (This gives an opportunity to talk about body language. Younger children might want to show you physically by copying the girl’s body language and showing the expression they imagine on her face) There are no words in the book, just pictures. And what amazing pictures they are! They're incredibly detailed, yet also simple. It looks like the illustrator used a variety of materials to create the pictures. Throughout much of the book, cool and muted colours are used, so the touches of red really stand out. There's also a steampunk-ish flavour to some of the illustrations, which I wasn't expecting (but which I really liked). In this next idea, pupils can bring some of the characters from the story to life to share their understanding of the motives, actions and decisions.Why not record the stories that emerge and make a collection of books to accompany them? These can be shared with another class or added to your own reading corner. Or you can record descriptions of single spreads and ask children to listen before matching each description to its picture. Use the title as the starting point for your own story. What might your own story about a ‘Journey’ include? Even though the nephew is beginning to read some, he still gets to read the wordless book. Let me tell you, his story was filled with all kinds of things you would not believe. It was exciting and filled with body humor, to say the least. (He was once asked what his favorite body part was and he answered, the butt cause it farts, and he laughed heartily.) The artwork is stellar here and it opened up my imagination. Scarcity-by Aaron GP. Scarcity-The basic concept in economics …. A resource is scarce when there is not enough available to satisfy the various ways a society wants to use it. Microeconomics is the study of individual decisions based on scarcity.

The girl meets the owner of the bird, another young child with a crayon of his own as well. Together they decide to create something new, something with one circle, then two… (Draw to big circles with your arms) Bicycle (reclining bicycle legs) As you explore the illustrations in the book, try to find features that might be clues about the rest of the story. A young girl escapes her lonely, sepia-tone world by drawing a door that leads into an enchanted world tinted with colour, adventure and, ultimately, friendship. She takes quite a JOURNEY in this completely wordless picture book, with her magical red crayon as the key. In a little rowing boat, she sails along the canals of a golden-domed city. In a bright-red hot-air balloon, she escapes one near-misadventure and heads towards another. Finally, she lands in a cage after an encounter with a sinister crew and an exotic purple bird, and, as the crayon falls from her hands, all seems lost. Bravery, and a little help from the loyal bird, leads her to further misadventures a bit closer to home, where she finds she's not the only one with a magic crayon and an imagination.This is, in my opinion, an essential book for parents and non-parents alike. It is a work of literature, stunning in its artistry, poetic in its imagery, minimalism, and allusions. They must not use any props, but instead use only themselves (eg – two people making an arch between them may be the cage which the girl is trapped in). Have a go at staging some of the spreads in this book as tableaux. The image showing the king throwing the crayon overboard works well for this, as does the scene in which the girl steals the bird.

And together, they made a bicycle! They can continue on to new journeys and worlds together. Two crayons are better than one 🙂 Closing (savasana, or resting pose)This book isn't an entirely original idea, but it is very well executed. The scenes are vibrant. The full spread, and sometimes double spread illustrations are highly detailed. And yet, the funny thing is, much of this is in drab colors. A vivid red is used to indicate the magic items the girl has drawn. Otherwise nothing more than a touch of gold here or a highlighted gleam of light there are used to transform the dull landscape into something living and vaguely mysterious. Then she sees a beautiful purple bird getting captured by some samurai-type soldiers. She wants to save the bird. She frees the bird, but ends up imprisoned in a cage herself. The bird frees her by bringing her the red chalk. She draws a red magic carpet and flies away. The purple bird leads her to a purple door. When she goes through it, she discovers the bird's creator - a boy with a purple piece of chalk. Now she is friends with the boy and they will go on many adventures together.