Pick a Picture Book

I absolutely love The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg. This book is a series of illustrations with a title and a picture caption. The pictures do not go together, but rather they are all pictures out of different books that haven’t actually been written. This book is fantastic to use with creative writing. If you put up just one of the pictures, all of your students could write a different fantasy story based on that one picture and caption. It could be a really cool lesson in creativity to share all the different places students took their stories based on the same image. It could also be a cool character lesson to show that we all have different backgrounds and have had different experiences and even though we are seeing the same picture, we are all seeing it differently. We are all unique and none of the answers are wrong, just different, and really great to share with our friends.

My favorite image in this book is titled A Strange Day in July. The picture caption reads, “He threw with all his might but the third stone came skipping back.” The picture is in black and white. There is a boy who looks to be about eight years old and a girl who looks six or seven. You can’t see either of their faces because their backs are turned to us. You can see just a bit of sandy beach at the bottom of the page. There are large rocks in the sand and some wild grass sticking out here and there. The whole top of the page is water, and the sun is shining on the water so spectacularly. There are sun spots glistening all over the water so that you can tell is a sun shiny day. However, neither child is dressed for a day at the beach: the boy is wearing long pants and a long sleeved shirt. The girls is wearing a fancy light colored dress. It looks like she could wear it in a wedding or to church on Sunday. Both of their hair is shining in the sunlight as well. There is one rock hovering over the water. You can’t tell if it is skipping away or towards the beach.