The Mysteries of Harris Burdick

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After you have finished the story (and don’t worry if it is not completely cohesive and brilliant—storytelling in this fashion takes a lot of practice!), debrief with your students. What was hard for them? What was easy? What was fun? Reinforce the idea that they have created a brand-new story together as a community, starting with only a tiny seed of an idea presented by Chris Van Allsburg. Tell them that you will be practicing this activity again, using the same story idea. Instead of having each student use an individual notebook, create a class list of ideas on chart paper to which students can refer. Instead of asking them to write stories based on ideas the class comes up with, you may want to have very young children tell the stories out loud. You can take dictation, and the students can illustrate their stories—or you can simply leave them as oral storytelling experiences. Chris Van Allsburg often writes stories in which unusual things happen in very normal-seeming situations—like the ocean liner pushing through the Venice canal. Can you think of other books, either by Van Allsburg or by other authors, in which unusual things happen in everyday places? I just read the entire Chris Van Allsburg collection today, and I feel that since it was multiple picture books I’ll count them all as one single entry in my reading challenge.

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick - Newport CE Junior School The Mysteries of Harris Burdick - Newport CE Junior School

But what can a picture of a nun quietly sitting in a chair floating in a cathedral have to do with a caption that says, "THE SEVEN CHAIRS: The fifth one ended up in France?"Share the work of several students who have made headway in listing ideas they will use for stories later on. Choose students who have really stretched their imaginations—the more unique and creative ideas students are exposed to, the easier it will be for them to stretch their own minds as well. We looked through this in bed and the nephew made up some stories to go with the pictures. For not having robots in the pictures, they had a whole lot of monsters in them. The next day, I made some copies of the pictures and we sat down and they had to write a story based off one of the pictures. I had to scribe for the nephew.

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick | RIF.org The Mysteries of Harris Burdick | RIF.org

Give different pairs/groups an illustration or caption from the book (or both) and ask them to collectively write a story. Not all the stories are scary, but many of them have at least some creepiness to them, which certainly fits the tone of the drawings and the overall mystery. It made for pretty good Halloween reading, sort of like reading a collection of Ray Bradbury's stories. If you've got younger kids, you may want to preview the book before giving it to them — as with Bradbury's books, a few of these may send a few shivers down your spine, and would be liable to keep my seven-year-old up at night. Have the children use ideas they have written in their notebooks to write stories of their own. When they are finished, ask them to illustrate what they have written.

I must say that Under the Rug is the one that unnerves me the most. What is under the rug??? We will never know, hahaha). Here's my suggestion: if you're a fan of the original and you've heard of at least a few of the authors, you should definitely get this book. It's a big book, sized so that they didn't have to shrink down the illustrations, and it's gorgeous to look at. You may not like all of the tales in the book, but you're sure to enjoy several of them. But get your kids the original (or the portfolio) and don't let them read this until they're a little older — mostly because you don't want to take away their chance of discovering the stories they have inside them before they read these. When Chris was three years old, his family moved to a new house at the edge of Grand Rapids that was part of a development; a kind of planned neighborhood, that was still being built. Because of the open interpretation of the pictures, titles, and captions, these are great story starters for students. They can help teach imagination and thinking outside the box when writing a story. My niece is pretty gifted at story telling and she came up with two interesting stories. She liked the one with the Nun floating up in the air on a chair and the bird on the wallpaper that is coming to life.

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick - Goodreads

Me fascinó como con esto tu imaginación trabaja el doble y empiezas a pensar el por qué de casa situación ocurrida en el libro. De como se llegó a ese punto y de que es lo qué está pasando en realidad.The book is available in a Portfolio Edition which includes another image/caption pair from the story "Missing in Venice".