Museum Trip

Book Title: Museum Trip

Author & Illustrator: Barbara Lehman

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright Date: 2006

Genre: Picturebook (Wordless): Contemporary Realistic Fiction

Brief Annotation: This wordless picturebook begins with a little boy on a class trip to the museum. The boy soon becomes separated from his class and sets out to explore the mysteries of the museum on his own, which includes becoming part of the art.

Your Rating (1-5) and why: 4 – Museum Trip has fun and simple artwork which is detailed enough, but not too overwhelming, to allow the reader to understand the general path of the story while being able to give their own words to this wordless book. However, downsides of this book, for me, are that I didn’t have any emotional reaction or really feel a connection to the book.

Readers who will like this book: Young children who have the ability to understand illustrations enough to be able to create/tell their own interpretation of the story.

Teaching Strategy from Yopp & Yopp: Graphic Organizer (p. 73-77); Yopp & Yopp include this as a during-reading activity, but since the students would be helping “read” the book, I would use a graphic organizer after reading the book. You could use the graphic organizer to talk about the order of events in the story – this helps students to understand the rules by which stories are structured. I would emphasize how we were able to determine the flow of the story without words in the book.

Question to ask about this book before a read aloud: Have you ever seen a book that doesn’t have any words? Using the illustrations in this book, who would like to help tell this story about a boy and his class trip to a museum? (Choose several students who will take turns helping tell the story in their own words.) First, we have to give this boy a name…

Interest Level (age): 4-8