Ocean Meets Sky: 1

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The beginning of the book has illustrations that are a bit more muted. I guess that's supposed to show the mundane ordinary world... but I found them kind of dull and boring. Once Finn gets into the fantasy, the pictures are much more engaging. I particularly liked the island of giant shells and the sea of jellyfish. The great golden fish, though, I found a bit terrifying; he acts as Finn's guide, so he's kind of a necessary part of the story, but I'm not sure how he'd go over with little kids. Children find a mysterious box in the classroom labelled Grandpa’s Stuff. Inside they will find clues to who Grandpa was and his relationship with the main character, Finn. Finn misses his Grandfather after he has passed away and longs to travel to the fantastical worlds that his Grandpa would tell him about in his stories. From the creators of The Night Gardener, comes a stunning new picture book about a young boy who sets sail to find a place his grandfather told him about... the spot where the ocean meets the sky. And indeed, not really all that much if at all focussing (except for some textual reassurance if required) on the Fan brothers’ printed words but rather on their large and mostly glowingly luminous illustrations has made me not only appreciate but also absolutely love and cherish Ocean Meets Sky. For the pictures are not only truly aesthetically marvellous and visually rich, they also evocatively and engagingly show young Finn’s dreamlike sailing journey to where according to his deceased grandfather the ocean meets the sky as both an absolute visual delight and equally paying homage to the memory of his grandfather, full of whimsy, full of magic, full of unbridled imagination (with the added sweetness that upon waking from his sailing dream, Finn is told that he and his family will be dining on his grandfather’s special dumplings).

Children are given a variety of meaningful writing opportunities throughout the sequence and gradually build up the skills to write an extended fantasy story of their own. By the way, it is worth mentioning that Finn, his mother, and his grandfather all have Asian facial features and the dinner Finn wakes up to is a traditional dumpling dish. As someone who grew up in a time when Asians were very rarely represented in English-language picture books (other than as oddities), and even more rarely represented in English-language picture books created by authors of Asian heritage, I absolutely loved this unobtrusive integration of Asian characters and Asian cultural elements into the book.Author/Illustrator Study. Gather other books the Fan Brothers have authors and illustrated or just illustrated including The Night Gardener and The Antlered Ship . Compare the text and illustrations across the books. Students may particularly notice the use of color to create a whimsical effect across the books and the ways in which the Fan Brothers use a palette reflective of nature. Gather a variety of colored pencils, graphite pencils, and pens to have students incorporate the colors of nature into their illustrations of fictional stories to create whimsical effects by blurring parts of the landscape. This is lesson 1 from a three-week+ Lesson set Overview and outcomes: based within the context of Ocean Meets Sky by the Fan Brothers. http://www.kidlitfrenzy.com/kid-lit-frenzy/2018/6/21/ocean-meets-sky-an-interview-with-the-fan-brothers The writing is fairly sparse, which makes me a bit annoyed that it couldn't have been polished to perfection. As it is, there are a number of sentence fragments. I don't like seeing stuff like that in children's books, since many kids absorb a lot of grammar lessons simply by reading.

Here's how special this book is: my toddler, who has never experienced the death of a loved one and therefore has no idea about the process of grief and healing, understands what is going on in this book. While it is never explicitly stated that Finn's grandfather has passed, and never says that Finn misses him, my son understood. At one point during our second or third reading he said, "I miss my grandpa too!" Thankfully, his grandpas and his great-grandpa are all still with us, but I was amazed that the Fan brothers managed to convey this so clearly through the sparse text and the illustrations...well enough that a two-year-old understood that Finn was experiencing loss. That's really something. I was really intrigued by the cover of this one. The illustrations looked gorgeous, and some of them are. I wasn't absolutely in love with the story, though, and the writing had some problems.I’ve poured my heart and soul into making these PowerPoints beautiful to see, easy to use, resource and understand. The lessons are definitely suitable for Lower KS2, and can work wonderfully with minimal adaptation for Upper KS2 also (my Y6 colleague confirmed this).

The fantastically talented Fan Brothers, Terry and Eric, who made their debut with The Night Gardener, return in Ocean Meets Sky, the second picture-book that they have written and illustrated together. Here they follow the story of Finn, a young boy who is missing his (presumably deceased) grandfather. On the day his grandfather would have been ninety, Finn builds himself a ship and sets sail to find that place, mentioned many times by his elderly relative, where the ocean meets the sky. Along the way he encounters many wonders, taking a serene voyage into a fantastic dreamscape...Eric: All our books start with sketches and a rough dummy, before we start working on final art. I sketch in traditional media, as well as digitally. An iPad is actually a wonderful tool for doing a rough dummy because it’s very low stakes—you can always redo something or erase. Most of our books have found their start as a standalone image, where we had no plan to write a story around them. The Night Gardener actually started as a t-shirt design that Terry and I collaborated on ten years ago. Ocean Meets Sky and The Barnabus Project also started as standalone illustrations. The book, Ocean Meets Sky, is beautiful. I have used these PP lessons with my Year 3 class and had incredible work created by them. Their level of thinking and inferencial work has blown me away, along with their writing. The work actually lasted me an entire term to get through - 6 weeks. There is more than a single lesson’s worth of work within each PowerPoint. throughout and explores themes of family, memory and loss. The unit begins by introducing the authors to the children and highlighting the power of bookmaking/storytelling. Children find a mysterious box in the classroom labelled “Grandpa’s Stuff”. Inside they will find clues to who Grandpa was and his relationship with the main character, Finn. Finn misses his Grandfather after he has