Book Look: A Whole Book Approach Storytime (week 2, Orientation + a little Gutter talk)

This week, we compared books that were Landscape and books that were Portrait in orientation and talked about why that might be.

We started off with a little action rhyme:

And then I started off with a close comparative reading of I want my hat back and This is not my hat by Jon Klassen. I love reading these two books together and comparing/contrasting them!  The kids all agreed that the bear book was in portrait orientation because the bear stand up and is tall while the fish book is landscape because of the shape of the fish, but we talked about LOTS of other things as well!

Then we moved on to reading Building with Dad by Carol Nevius, illustrated by Bill Thompson which has such great perspectives in the illustrations!  The spine is on the TOP of the book (I'm sure there's an official binding or book design term for that, but I don't know what it is!) so that when you open the book it appears even TALLER than the cover image.  The kids pointed out that although many of the images are from down low, looking up high, there are a few where we are up high, looking down to the ground.  We also talked about the shifting horizon line and how it might help dictate how we should hold the book on each page.  (sorry, I've already sent my copy of the book along to another storytime, so you'll just have to find your own copy of the book to examine, but it is WORTH it.  One of my favorite "construction" books!)

Next, the kids chose to read the book Wave by Suzy Lee.  Although the horizontal pull of the wave and the width of the beach make the portait landscape an easy choice, we ended up talking a lot about the gutters in this book!  How at first, the gutter clearly divides the water from the girl and the birds:

 

and a few pages later, the girl and the birds cross over the gutter to join the water:

 and then how the mountains fade to nothing because the only thing interesting is playing with water:

 And then when the girl and the birds cross back over the gutter to get away from the water:

 And of course, when the water finally crosses the gutter in this magnificent fashion, getting EVERYTHING wet...

I used, "Oh! The Magic Drawing App" as our app of the day because it does a PERFECT job of demonstrating the difference between portrait and landscape, plus it's a book app (a companion app to the book "That's my hat!") and it's free!

At this halfway point, I feel like this storytime would be EXCELLENT for school-age kids, but is stretching the preschoolers pretty far.  Most of my responses are from a homeschool family that attends and a few of the parents making keen observations as well. But if you've got a regular program that combines books and school age kids... I think this would be a hit!

Next week we'll be looking at endpapers by special request of one of the kiddos!  (I LOVE endpapers...)