Journey

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There’s also a fun paper lantern project that I put together for the good folks at All the Wonders that your students might enjoy. First, calm your body with a deep breath in through your tummy, and out through your nose. Put your hands on your tummy, and imagine your breathing helps you ride the bike nice and slow. Bring a red rug into school (the sort you can roll up and carry under one arm) and use it for story sharing in small groups with an adult helper (perhaps in secret locations around the school). Invite children to sit on the rug and talk about the special places they would like to go. As you explore the illustrations in the book, try to find features that might be clues about the rest of the story.

A girl is bored with her grey house full of grey people doing grey things. Even her grey cat is sleeping and doesn't want to play. After reading you might ask them to jot down their initial responses: what did they like or dislike about the book? Did it remind them of any other books that they have read, or perhaps films that they have seen? Was there anything that they found puzzling, strange, confusing? Did they have any questions when they had finished the book? In class, ask the children to use their notes to help them share their ideas in small groups. 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: Collect some everyday objects in a variety of shapes and materials (a saucepan, an old bicycle wheel and an umbrella, perhaps?) and use them to spark ideas for stories. Create a box of ‘story prompts’ by writing questions on cards.Imagine that you had a pen that could be used to draw (and create) real objects. What would you draw? Could you write a new story based on this concept? Let your imagination lead the way and begin your journey. Think of names for the places and things you draw.

Provide some text on laminated cards and ask the children to match the text to the image. This can be done in pairs if working in school. Make explicit the point that artists and writers often make references to other works of art and cultural influences in their work. Here’s a list of some of the things you might find you might discover more:So, she decides to act. Her hot air balloon lands, and she makes a break for it, running to grab the cage, and just in time she throws open the doors and frees the bird! The girl is captured (sit with knees up and head down) I'd never heard of Journey. My mom heard about it somewhere, though, and she borrowed it from the library. I borrowed it from her. And I was completely enchanted by it. LOVE that. Especially because, despite the fact that the journey in this book is by that of a young girl, it still felt very much like a personal journey for the illustrator. So reading his bio at the end didn't surprise me at all. This book really is his journey.

You can grab the whole trio of books here. They also lend themselves nicely to yoga lesson plans and sequences .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. 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.

This may be a children's book, but I can see it having much broader appeal than that. It seems to be popular among adults as well, and I totally understand why. It's fun, it's cute, it's engaging, and it's skillfully done. It's one of the best picture books I've read! I also have two Q&A’s that might get your students wondering about being authors themselves one day(!): The child in the story we are going to read has this wonderful crayon that opens up a door into a new world. She goes on a Journey into the world and finds some incredible things to do and explore. Let’s read it together and find out what she does.Start this activity with some guided visualisation. Give each child a coloured crayon or pencil. Use a variety of colours – one colour per child. To begin, have them hold the coloured pencil and think about the things that colour reminds them of. Now invite them to imagine in their ‘mind’s-eye’ (like television pictures running in their head) that they are at home in their room. It’s a dull day. Everyone else is busy doing their own thing. Imagine that you look down at your crayon. You have an idea! You go over to the wall and draw a door with your crayon. You open the door and step through into another world.