Module 3: Flotsam

Summary:
This wordless children's story tells the tale of a boy who takes a trip to the beach and discovers an old Melville camera that has washed up onto the shore. Upon developing the film, he views unusual sea creatures and pictures that children before him have taken of themselves. Some of the photos are pictures within a picture, so he takes some snapshots of himself holding other pictures and discards the camera into the sea. Eventaully the cycle of picture taking will begin again as the next child finds the old camera at the end of the story.

Reference:
Wiesner, D. (2006). Flotsam. New York: Clarion Books.

My Impressions of the Book:
One might think a book must have words to be enjoyable, but that is truly not the case with this amazing, one-of-a-kind wordless book. The story is entertaining and delightful because it's from the boy's perspective, an inside view of his beach trip. The pictures within a picture that are developed show kids enjoying the beach from decades past. This use of the picture within a picture is part of the ingenious creativity of the book. Flotsam truly deserves the Caldecott Award!

Reviews:
Engberg, G. (2006, August). [Review of the book Flotsam]. The Booklist Starred,Vol. 102, No. 22.
As in his Caldecott Medal Book Tuesday (1991), Wiesner offers another exceptional, wordless picture book that finds wild magic in quiet, everyday settings. At the seaside, a boy holds a magnifying glass up to a flailing hermit crab; binoculars and a microscope lay nearby. The array of lenses signals the shifting viewpoints to come, and in the following panels, the boy discovers an old-fashioned camera, film intact. A trip to the photo store produces astonishing pictures: an octopus in an armchair holding story hour in a deep-sea parlor; tiny, green alien tourists peering at sea horses. There are portraits of children around the world and through the ages, each child holding another child's photo. After snapping his own image, the boy returns the camera to the sea, where it's carried on a journey to another child. Children may initially puzzle, along with the boy, over the mechanics of the camera and the connections between the photographed portraits. When closely observed, however, the masterful watercolors and ingeniously layered perspectives create a clear narrative, and viewers will eagerly fill in the story's wordless spaces with their own imagined story lines. Like Chris Van Allsburg's books and Wiesner's previous works, this visual wonder invites us to rethink how and what we see, out in the world and in our mind's eye.

Use in a library setting:
This book would be great to discuss topics such as wordless books, Caldecott winners, or to share with other beach themed books. Showing examples of wordless books would also lead up to a great technology project. Students could take their own digital pictures, upload them to movie maker, and show their own wordless story.