Friday, October 22, 2010

Black and White

Title: Black and White
Author: David Macaulay
Genre: Children's Picture Book
Age Level: Upper Elementary
Rating: 5 Stars
Black and White is a unique picture book that is completely unlike any I have read before.  The book has multiple stories going on at once, each of which is in a different corner of the pages, and each of which connects to the others in some way.  The different stories are written in different texts, to help differentiate between them.  The style in which the images are illustrated also differ, from line-oriented, monochromatic sketches, to colorful cartoon-like pictures.  The stories are able to connect a herd of cows, newspapers, a train ride, and a family all to one another.

I think this book would be especially fun for students to read in their free time in a classroom.  In terms of content, I wouldn't personally recommend using this book for a lesson, unless it was on different styles of illustration, or as an example to mimic in a writing activity.  The story that I particularly enjoyed was the one involving the heard of cows (found in the lower right hand corner of each page).  These illustrations were particularly striking because the black and white tended to form various optical illusions.  Overall, this book is something that should take students a while to read and understand, because they should pay special attention to each detail in the images that help build the story as a whole.

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