This picture book is a great provocation for discussion and writing. It also provides many opportunities for integration with the arts.

It is so rich, I really feel it could be used at any grade, all the way to grade 12. For older students it could be used to launch a dystopian novel such as The Hunger Games, The Giver, The Maze Runner, 1984.

Even though the book has such a dystopian cast to it, it really is a book about resilience, hope, beauty, making a difference. I recently read it with my grade 4 students, but have read it to grade 7 and 8 students in the past.

You can expect to build comprehension skills such as inferring, predicting, visualizing. You can expect a lot of oral language development and many opportunities for students to think critically and elaborate on ideas.

This can be a quick read aloud for a half hour lesson, or it can be savored over a few sessions through drama activities. Here are some things you could do with this book.

Read-aloud in One Session

Pre-reading Activity

Create a concrete experience by making actual flowers be part of the lesson.

If you can, bring some flowers in, or go outside to look at some (even if it’s some dandelions or other wild flower). Have students look carefully at the flower and talk about what it looks like, smells like, feels like.

I did this with my grade 4 class using a single daffodil. I had them gather around me to look at it. The students talked about how fragile it is, they noticed the shape, the petals, the colour. I offered the word stamen to a student who had something to say about that part of the flower.

Facilitate a conversation about flowers. Why are flowers important?

In my case, students’ responses started off with the benefits of flowers to the environment. I suspect they were connecting this to our Habitats unit in which we had a whole adventure learning about bees and flowers and pollination and what a natural disaster it would be if bees became extinct. I had to ask them to think of occasions when we use flowers and what’s the point of doing that.

They mentioned weddings, funerals, graduation, and other special occasions. They mentioned flowers having symbolic meaning, like poppies on Remembrance Day, and Trillium the Ontario provincial flower. They talked about how bright, colourful flowers can cheer us up when we are sad, which is why they make good gifts if someone is sick. They talked about their own experiences with flowers. That conversation led us to a whole tangent about beauty in art, music, nature, and the things that bring us joy.

During Reading

Students will notice details about the pictures on their own. Invite them to make observations. One stand-out observation might be the dull grey colours and the contrast of Brigg being in colour. The illustrations, though intentionally dreary, have a treasure trove of things to notice and wonder about.

This book is so provocative, you will likely get lots of questions, and might not need to ask as many probing questions as you might with other books. Some questions that my students asked:

Wait, why does he have a job, shouldn’t he be in school?

Where’s his family?

What kind of place is this?

Why weren’t they allowed to read certain books?

Some questions I asked:

What might make a book dangerous? What do you imagine was in some of the “dangerous books”? On one of the pages we see Jack and the Beanstalk and Alice in Wonderland written in the illustration, what would be true of a world where books like these are considered dangerous?

What is this book about? I asked them at first for one word, then I asked them to elaborate.

What would it take to fill a whole city with flowers? (Here I challenged them to think about the difficulties Brigg might face as he set off to change his world, and what character traits are required to do such a thing).

After Reading – Reader Response Prompts

• Describe the steps Brigg might take to fill the city with flowers.
• Write the story of one of the objects in the Junk shop. Who owned it? What’s a special memory associated with that object? How did it end up in the Junk shop? Where is the original owner now?
• Write a list of some other rules that might exist in this world (similar to “Do not Read”).
• Write a journal entry from Brigg’s point of view, expressing what the flower means to him and the impact of losing it.

Drama Activities – Savor the Story Over Several Sessions

As an aside, I didn’t come up with these drama activities. I got these ideas from a resource first from a Drama AQ course I’d taken, and I later found them in a created by my board – if you’re with the TDSB, you can borrow the resource through Tippette. It’s a booklet complete with Visual Arts, Drama, and Dance activities, all dedicated to exploring this complex picture book.

Strategies outlined in the text include questioning, tableau, soundscape, value and texture study, 3D construction, The Wave, role play, writing in role (RAFT), portrait study, self-portraits, hot-seating, spectrum of difference, visualization, collage, shape-shifting, dance phrases, collaborative poetry writing. The strategies look a lot like Larry Schwartz and Bob Barton’s Drama in Education MO.

I tried a few of them, below is a quick peak at how it went for me.

I have the desks in my classroom arranged in a U-shape to create space for drama and movement activities. If you don’t have this option, you might take the students outside, or to some other room where you have an open area in which to work.

It took two weeks to get through all these activities, spread out over about five lessons. I treated it more as drama sessions than as literacy, although it’s very clearly literacy. The students often asked when are we getting back to Brigg, which told me they hadn’t lost interest.

Soundscape

On this page, I invited the students to step into the world of the story. What do they imagine they hear?

The wind, the rain coming down on umbrellas, footsteps, traffic in the distance, voices and different forms of vocalizing (maybe sighs, or grunts), the sound of coat fabric as people move.

I asked the students how could they produce these sounds using body percussion, voice and found instruments. I allowed them to produce some of these sounds. I placed them in groups of four or five and had them work for 10 minutes to create a soundscape that evokes the scene on the page.

I got some help from an itinerant music teacher who visits my classroom once a week. She guided them away from a regular pattern, to more closely mimic the naturally helter-skelter of sounds in a city. At the same time one might say that a steady rhythm might evoke the feel of being in an army, which would match the sense that the characters live in an authoritarian regime.

Overheard Conversations

I asked the students to sit in pairs facing each other. I set this up by first having two students sit facing each other, then I showed them they would need to fill the space roughly in rows and columns (I needed space to wander about so I could “overhear” some of their conversations). I told them they had a minute to settle into position based on the instructions I’d given. In actuality, it took three or so minutes.

Their task was to improvise the conversation that might take place sometime after Brigg smuggled the “Do not read’ book from the library. The conversation could be between Brigg and an imagined character, maybe the librarian, or one of the Umbrella People (they’re not called that, but these figures carrying umbrellas feature in the illustrations more than once).

I walked about amongst the students listening for snippets of conversation to amplify. When I heard something interesting, I asked everyone to stop, then I had just those two carry on their conversation while the rest listened.

The overheard conversations showed a mix of reactions to Brigg’s smuggling the book: shock that he would dare to break the rule, alarm about what the consequences might be, curiosity about what’s in the book, respect for his going against the grain.

It was a very noisy activity since at some points all twenty-eight students were speaking at once.

Teacher in Role

When I got to the page where Brigg stops outside the window of the Junk Shop, I beckoned to the students to gather in front of me. At this point I imagined myself as the store keeper and I wanted them to imagine themselves as a person in the story, perhaps Brigg, without me having to say any of this explicitly to them.

It worked like I hoped it would; I’d recently been to a theatre production and seen this done, the actors mimed calling the audience near and we all responded and became part of the performance.

I started by saying, “Is there something I can help you with?” While I said this, I pointed first at a student, then to the page with the Junk Shop store front. In this way the students understood what was happening and went along with it. When someone pointed at the skates, I said “Skates? What in the world are you going to do with these?” At first things didn’t go as well as I wanted so I got out of role for a moment and modeled the kind of response I wanted to hear.

After that, they got the hang of it and improvised backstories – sometimes just short snippets, sometimes rambling tales. Some were very poignant and insightful as if they understood the dystopian world in which the story takes place (“I used to have skates before my parents were taken”). Some were outlandish and off base (“because I saw a star fall out of the sky” – referring to a star in the junk shop).

In this way, we gave the character a personality and a history, something which seems to be missing from the lives of the people in this dreary existence.

Writing in Role

When the room cleaning system sucks away Brigg’s flowers, he is devastated, And so were my students. Perfect time for them to write a letter to Brigg.

Prompt:

What would you say to Brigg at this point? Write him a letter.

Corridor of Voices

I had the students underline their most powerful line in the letter to Brigg. I told them to imagine that he might only hear a tiny bit of what they had to say to him, what would be the most important thing they would want him to hear? Then I had them stand shoulder to shoulder in two lines facing each other, forming a pathway. Once the corridor was set up, I had one student walk the pathway in role as Brigg.

As Brigg walked the corridor, the students on either side said their line to him.

It took several minutes to get this right. And even when we did get it flowing, I knew this wasn’t quite the best experience. For one thing some of their lines were too long, so the overlapping, echoing effect didn’t happen, and Brigg felt he had to slow his pace to hear the whole thing. If I could do it again, I would say something like no more than four words.

Role Play

I asked the students to work in groups of four or five to depict a moment in the story, or sometime after the story ends, or create their own what if scenarios. I told them they had to be ready for presentation in 10 minutes. I find that a tight deadline helps them to focus better. I allowed some groups to use the hallway to prepare their scenes, the ones likely to misbehave or take forever to settle down, I had stay in the room where I could have an eye on them.

This went very well overall. My favourite moment was where one group dramatized the flower growing up out of the soil. The one girl moved her hand in a flowing upward movement up through negative space created by a second student. We all knew what was happening without being told what it was.

Another highlight was a scene in which there is an interaction between Brigg and the librarian. While that is happening, in “another room”, security personnel is surveilling the situation and Brigg gets arrested before he can smuggle the book out of the library.

Something else that I really liked was when a small child asked an old person (who remembered the time before the dark days) the meaning of beautiful, and the old person replied something to the effect of “it’s when something is so pretty it makes you joyful”.

Only one student didn’t participate, that was because his group told me they could get nothing done for all the distractions he was causing. I had him sit out the activity.

One student who hardly ever speaks surprised me with a stellar performance.

After each presentation I asked them to tell me something they saw. I stumbled upon this strategy by accident when I completely misread something I’d seen and the conversation that followed helped to enrich the experience, while helping the actors feel like we were attentive during their performance. After that, I just allowed two students to say what they saw or felt after each performance.

Choral Speaking

I found a poem that I thought relates very well to the story (Live Life In Colour) and had them read the poem aloud, making deliberate choices on how they read by assigning certain lines to individuals or small sections, by asking them to whisper this part, or say that part loudly.

Parting thoughts

The Flower by John Light is a very profound and memorable picture book. It’s worth the time to linger over this one. The drama activities listed here can be applied to other picture books or other media.

Source

Can One Person Make a Difference: An Arts Integrated Unit Based on the Picture Book The Flower, By John Light. 2014, Barnett, Vanessa. Toronto District School Board Arts Dept.