Flotsam, The Silver Pony and Debris of Several Kinds
I'm guessing for bloggers that one of the good things about the craft
is that it can be picked up and set down at will. Which is what I've
done by neglecting to write lately. Life has a way of interrupting one
pursuit with another. It's a good thing, to have too much to do with
family, travel, other writing, and just plain horsing around. Wouldn't
want it any other way.
Now a couple of things have come across my desk -- the 2007 Caldecott Award winner and a New York Times article (February 6, 2007, Science Times ) -- that make the need to post on this blog rise to the top of the To Do List again.
I
know for a fact that the best thing about my topic of creative planning
for teaching is that it is so fluid. I ended my first series of posts,
which was about getting kids today to listen and pay attention, and I
was all ready to branch off into another series that might interest
teachers -- integrating the curriculum in our multi-media world.
And
then along come the Caldecott announcement and the Times piece by
William J. Broad and I'm off and running, slightly off track but full
steam ahead nonetheless. This is a case of the Gots To Do.
The
interdisciplinary nature of some picture books for children is
well-documented and much-loved. I've been writing about this for years,
and if any of my books were still in print (heavy sigh), I'd refer you
to the sections that discuss my intense pleasure at using such books
with students. Alas, I'll have to re-cap some of what I've written for
you, but not right now.
I don't get as much joy going over my
previous work as I do in plunging into what's currently exciting me --
the work of David Weisner, Lynd Ward, and space experts. So they go
first.
Flotsam is David Weisner's latest Caldecott Award winner
for best 2006 American picture book. It is wordless, and we owe so much
to Weisner for giving us such other grand wordless books over the years
-- Tuesday (1992 Caldecott winner), Free Fall (1989 Caldecott Honor
Book), Sector 7 (2000 Caldecott Honor Book), as well as the fun words
in The Three Pigs (2002 Caldecott winner). Also look at his wordless
Hurricane and June 29, 1999.
In Flotsam, the tide offers a boy
on the beach some intriguing debris -- an old underwater camera -- and
the developed pictures are not only of fantasy creatures of the deep
but also of a girl holding a photo of a boy holding a photo of another
child who is holding a photo of another...and so on, each photo seen
through the boy's magnifying glass, giving him glimpses into the past
in other parts of the world.
Weisner was born too late to have
as much firsthand knowledge as I do of the picture-within-a-picture
visual gimmick so popular in children's magazines during my own 1940's
childhood. I used to collect these pictures and still have today one of
my favorites: on the cover of a December Progressive Farmer magazine,
Santa is in his bubblebath reading the same Progressive Farmer that has
Santa on the cover in his bubblebath, and so on. Weisner's photo is
also different in Flotsam, in that each child pictured holds a photo of
another child. But you get where my nostalgia came from the first time
I looked at the book.
A tiny disappointment in Flotsam is that
the fantastic photos of life beneath the sea -- where there are
mermaids, street lamps, and even a dog's collar on a fish -- are lost
on the out-going tide (but maybe the creatures below find a way to snap
some more? Yes, they must surely have taken the other ones!).
The
ending is perfect, however, as another child in another place finds the
camera as flotsam on her beach, and in the developed film will be the
picture the boy took of himself holding the photo he had found.
Interdisciplinary studies are abundant in this little book -- marine
biology, visual literacy, language arts, history, geography.
Rewind
for a look at a wordless book over 30 years back to The Silver Pony: a
Story in Pictures by Lynd Ward (Houghton, 1973), selected by the New
York Times Book Review section as one of the Best Illustrated Books of
that year. Go online to get yourself a copy. (Ward also won the
Caldecott Award, for The Biggest Bear in 1953.)
The Silver
Pony is a thick, black-and-white "chapter book" without words and at
first glance, you might well say No Way for today's children. Believe
me, you will be wrong. After a brief synopsis of plot and book design,
I will enumerate all the ways I found to expand on the enjoyment of
this book with children in kindergarten through second grade
--sometimes taking several sessions -- for over twenty years in the
classroom.
In The Silver Pony, a lonely farm boy is visited by
a flying horse that takes him on magical night-time journeys. The first
is North, where the boy drops an apple to an Eskimo child; South to
help an African-American boy with a rowboat save a stranded family on a
rooftop during a flood (shades of New Orleans during Katrina); West
where the boy and his pony rescue a young Native American shepherd's
lamb from the jaws of a mountain lion; and East to deliver sunflowers,
first to a Puerto Rican girl on a rooftop in the Big City and another
for a girl at a lighthouse overlooking the Atlantic.
The only
direction left is to fly up, but there the boy and his faithful steed
get smacked by a rocket, are sent plummeting to earth, and sadly only
the boy survives. His parents present him with a pony, and he is seen
riding off, we assume for other, real-life, adventures.
The book
design is simple, each illustration facing a blank page. An
accumulation of stars signify the change in chapters -- one star, two,
three, up to eight if my memory serves. This design itself is where
children begin. They are warned that for this big, fat book they are
the ones who will tell the story, not you, for there are only three
words -- The Silver Pony -- and showing all those blank pages assures
them this is truly a book they could "read".
After one star
for Chapter One, you begin lessons in Visual Literacy by asking them,
What do you see? What is it called? What does it do? And thus begins a
visual inventory of all the youngsters can find to point out on each
page. Stressing the "What, Who, When and Where" questions gives childen
-- especially city children -- the opportunity to learn and name all
the details in the pictures that tell them that this is a farm early in
the morning. This inventory is important to take time for, to give the
very young child practice in order to be able later to analyze and
interpret -- the "How and Why" questions -- other events later in the
story.
Because very soon the boy -- who the children say
"looks sad", the beginning of interpretation, which is great since they
are starting to get into what Ward is doing with his story -- is going
to get whupped, and this is also important to take time for. For
goodness sake, in today's world a spanking means so much more to us
than it did to Ward thirty years ago, when we had not analyzed all that
such discipline might do to children.
In The Silver Pony, the
boy is turned over his father's knee and flat out gets a whipping, and
some entire classrooms full of children I have known fall absolutely
silent at this, either out of disbelief or out of empathy, bless their
hearts (maybe having experienced some such themselves). You can not
continue The Silver Pony without first analyzing why it is the boy is
being punished, and it gives an adult an excellent time to help
children examine in pictures the motivation for actions that often
occur in real life. Is this case, the boy endangered himself by running
in front of the father's tractor, plus dad had to stop work for nothing
(assuming the boy lied.....).
Isn't that what visual literacy can be about? Applying what we see in pictures to help us understand our own lives?
This
unhappy episode early on also sets the stage for the fact that this
book will not be all sweetness and light. Hard times lay ahead.
I
will not deconstruct all of The Silver Pony is this way; it would be
far too tedious. I leave it up to you to find the book and begin your
own interpretations. But I hope you see that within the first few
pages, this book can reach today's kids with an impact few other books
have.
I will however give a shorthand review of all I found
delightfully interdisciplinary about the book as I used it with
children through the '70's, '80's and '90's:
(1) Language Arts:
Introduce younger children to chapter books, in which a change in
chapters is defined as a change in Time or Place or Both. Can they
distinguish which it is for each chapter? And what parts of the story
might be left out between some of the changes?
(2) Weather
Science: Review the cardinal directions through Ward's use of a weather
vane on top of the barn. (City kids may at first call it a windmill or
a pinwheel....) Weather vanes can be fascinating works of art. Buy a
simple one and mount it for kids to work with. Make simple ones with
straws, straight pins and paper.
(3) Geography: Study a map of
North America to imagine where the pony is taking the boy each time.
Study about those places. Learn about the people who live there. Why
would apples and sunflowers be such surprises for children in some
parts of this hemisphere? What other kinds of things might be fun to
take? Does the boy himself live in the Midwest?
(4) Literature:
Broaden a search for other stories about flying horses, a recurring
motif in literature around the world down through the ages. You have
only to start with Pegasus, and for that many children have already
seen the Hollywood animated movie.
(5) Last of all the areas to
study -- Space Technology -- is introduced by the terrible scene in The
Silver Pony in which the boy and pony have flown into outer space, only
to be sent falling to earth again. The silence in the classroom can
indeed be deafening when this page is turned. All the practice given to
the children in inventorying and analyzing what they have seen in the
book until now comes into play, usually with positive results for their
interpretation of events, however disquieting.
It seems that
in 1973 Ward envisioned the possibility of space debris in a nuclear
age, a veritable junkyard of whirling debris either cast off by space
craft or left over from explosions and destructive tests. Bits of
orbiting, cast-off technology, he was saying in his pictures, would
begin to dangerously crowd outer space.
Enter now -- February
2007 -- The New York Times Science News article with its headline,
"Orbiting Junk, Once a Nuisance, Is Now a Threat". (An Internet search
for "space debris" offers all the background needed to explore this
topic if the article itself can no longer be accessed.) According to
the article, not only is the threat of colliding debris a reality in
space, but it is also predicted that such a collision will "start a
chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for
centuries, spreading chaos through the heavens."
Reading
further, one learns that such cascade warnings began as early as 1978
(Ward must've surely felt vindicated), but Washington and Moscow
generally ignored the danger, so the number of objects grew as more
nations launched rockets and satellites into orbit. By now, two-thirds
of the 3000 spacecraft orbiting Earth are no longer active, and nearly
7000 pieces of man-made debris are large enough to be tracked.
Flotsam indeed.
Never
fear that children will have bad dreams after this part of The Silver
Pony. The resilience of childhood is truly remarkable, as study after
psychological study has assuredly shown. Bringing kids the bad news
about our space junkyards -- if only in a wordless picture book backed
up by newspaper accounts -- succeeds only in firing most of them up to
get out shovels and the dustpan. Time and again, the ending of The
Silvery Pony to youngsters is still uplifting, because the boy gets a
real pony and has the first truly big smile to be seen in the whole
book. So it is. They view the calamity as solveable. In a child's
world, so it is and so it goes. Every silver lining's got a pony in it.
This book ends for them as satisfying as does Weisner's Flotsam.
For
our adult edification, experts say that a solution to the cascade
threat in space may exist, but it will be costly. Existing large
objects might be removed from orbit. Lasers might be used to zap
debris. Engines might be installed to send dead spacecraft back into
the atmosphere.
And it could be that some youngster sitting
there quietly for the ending to The Silver Pony will be the one who
grows up to figure it out.
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