The Red Book

I would probably never have picked up The Red Book, had it not won a Caldecott Honor (any book that wins a Caldecott Honor is automatically coming home with me). The front page has no title -- just a child wrapped up in winter clothes carrying, you guessed it, a red book.

I knew this was a wordless book, so I opened it up thinking the story would be obvious (like the sublime, recently released The Lion & The Mouse, brilliantly illustrated by Jerry Pinkney).

Not so.

I turned a few pages, had to go back, went forward a few more pages again, but then had to go back, got to the end, and had to start all over.

Amazing. A book with no words, so complex, that a fairly well-read high school English teacher had to "read" it more than once -- and I'm still not sure I "get" it.

I think what I would do in a classroom is this (with some anxiety because I don't like teaching a lesson when I'm really not sure where it's going -- or even quite what I have in mind):

1. Tell students we're going to "read" a wordless picture book.
2. Ask them to take out their journals and begin writing by making some predictions based on the title and cover.
3. Ask for complete quiet in the room (I might play some soft music), explaining that I want every student to come to this text with no preconceived notions and to make their own, strictly independent interpretations.
4. Give students a minute or so to react, in their journals, to each page. (This book is plenty small enough to display using a document camera, thank goodness.)
5. Finally, put kids in small groups to share their journal entries with each other, and ask each group to be ready to share the group's single most "wow" observation with the rest of the class.
6. Once presentations are complete, students would write two things: a one-line summary of the story AND a one-line theme of the story.

As I think more on this, I'm wondering if The Red Book would work well as a companion to The Book Thief (thinking about the power of books to transform the reader -- or this case, transport the reader). And maybe, with my AP kids, we could look at this book along with Going After Cacciato to further investigate the very-fine-line between imagination and reality.

Or, another idea ... ask one of my school's superb art teachers to give us a brief lecture on illustration basics (i.e., how horizontal lines suggest peace, whereas vertical lines indicate aspirations), and then ask students to apply those basics to an interpretation of the text. This book would work amazingly well for this task.

Here's the moral of this not-very-well-thought-out post ... even the most seemingly simple picture book is rich with possibilities for stimulating students' thinking. And isn't that what we want to do? Get our kids to think deeply?

And I'm sure best practice proponents everywhere (and I'm most surely one) will cringe at this next statement, but here it is anyway ... Once in a while, it's okay to embark on a lesson that is loosely thought out and vague in direction. Much like opening a picture book with no preconceived notions in mind, perhaps the very greatest adventure awaits. That certainly is the case with a brave, imaginative girl who dares open The Red Book.