Module 3 : Flotsam

 

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SUMMARY

The definition of flotsam is debris or items that have been washed up on shore. This book is a wordless book, yet the storyline is crystal clear. This story is about a boy who finds flotsam, and one of the more intriguing items he finds is an underwater camera. This camera is such a treasure because it holds images from deep down under the sea.

APA REFERENCE
Weisner, D. (2006). Flotsam. New York: Clarion Books

IMPRESSIONS
Beautifully and vividly illustrated, this book works even better without words. The reader can swim through the pages and photos from the underwater camera as though they were there themselves. It also gives the reader a bit of hope and surprise to find an item like that too!

PROFESSIONAL REVIEW
[Review of the book Flotsam by David Weisner]. Kirkus Review retrieved on October 21, 2014 from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-wiesner/flotsam/.

From arguably the most inventive and cerebral visual storyteller in children’s literature, comes a wordless invitation to drift with the tide, with the story, with your eyes, with your imagination. A boy at the beach picks up a barnacle-encrusted underwater camera. He develops the film, which produces, first, pictures of a surreal undersea world filled with extraordinary details (i.e., giant starfish bestride the sea carrying mountainous islands on their backs), and then a portrait of a girl holding a picture of a boy holding a picture of another boy . . . and so on . . . and on. Finally, the boy needs a microscope to reveal portraits of children going back in time to a sepia portrait of a turn-of-the-century lad in knickers. The boy adds his own self-portrait to the others, casts the camera back into the waves, and it is carried by a sea creature back to its fantastic depths to be returned as flotsam for another child to find. In Wiesner’s much-honored style, the paintings are cinematic, coolly restrained and deliberate, beguiling in their sibylline images and limned with symbolic allusions. An invitation not to be resisted. (Picture book. 6-11)

LIBRARY USES

This book would be fun to display on the projector for the entire class to view. There could be 2 activities that could take place. A quiet story time would be as the librarian flips the pages, the students would write words to the story, and then share their own words to the illustrations of Flotsam. Another activity would be more interactive, and the students could tell the story out loud as the librarian flips the pages.