Friday, February 15, 2008

Tibet: Through the Red Box


Author/Illustrator: Peter Sis

Published by: Frances Foster Books, 1998

Genre: Picture Book, biography, Multi-cultural

Age: grades 3-5

Caldecott Honor Book 1999


This book is another by Sis about his experience. He is called home by his father so that he can receive the Red Box. Inside is his father's diary which includes writing, drawings and maps about his experience in Tibiet. When Sis was young his father was called to film the building of the road through the Himaylayan mountains. He was gone for a long time but when he came back he told Sis about his adventures. The book includes these stories from Sis' point of view and his father's point of view.


I liked how it taught me something about Tibet, its geographic features, religion, ruler, etc. I liked how each story linked with a color and he flashes back to the room where he is reading and it is that color too. Sis uses color as an important symbol or way to show passage of phases or time in a lot of his books.


I liked how he used different formats and font to show the different perspectives the story was told in. The more handwritten looking font are excerpts from his father's diary and along with them are pictures of things his father would have seen and experienced. These pages look old in the background like the pages of an old diary. In the sections where Sis is narrating the font is regular and the page is white. He also has illustrations of what he was experiencing at the same time his father was experiencing the story in Tibet and his father's outline is always there but it isn't filled in to show that he was missing out on parts of Sis' life.


At the end of each story you return to the room from which Sis is reading his father's diary. It is all one color and filled with images from the story. These are Sis' imaginings as he reads his father's word and the associations he has with the color of the room.


This book could be used as an introduction to altered books (look through the galleries at this website) or journaling used in the classroom. Altered books are a good way to let kids be free and creative. They can write, draw, paint, collage, etc. This book could be one that is provided for them to look at and get ideas about how one can pull together words and images. They could also take one theme and pull it throughout all the pages of a book. This theme could be something they have exprienced or maybe stories that have heard family members tell or maybe even an issue they want to address. The possibilities are endless but in the end they will create something that is uniquely theirs.

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