Black and White

Black and White by David Macaulay

Picture book for Grades

5 stars

                Black and White, at first appears to be four separate stories, but you soon come to the realization that they are all connected.  There is a story about a boy on a train, commuters waiting impatiently, some strange parents, and Holstein cows, that when they get out of the field they are almost impossible to find.

                When I first selected this book after reading the title, I thought it was going to be a book about discrimination of races.  Boy was I wrong.  This book is absolutely incredible.  So much is going on in this book that you have to reread it to catch all the things you missed.  Each page has the four stories, split up into quadrants.  The first page of the book even has titles for each story.  Even though we normally read left to right and top to bottom, I caught myself reading the story that was in the bottom right corner before the top left one.  And one of the stories has words every few pages, so I would look back and compare the pictures. It was also a lot of fun to see the connection between all the stories.  With the Holstein cows escaping and causing the train the little boy is on to stop and the commuters having to wait longer because the train was delayed.  But the part that I loved the most about the connections was how some characters were in more than one story.

                There are endless teaching opportunities to derive from this book, and I think that might be why I love it so much.  So many discussions about different perspectives when writing, why is the title Black and White, finding details, connecting text to illustrations, etc.  There are a lot of literary elements being covered in each individual story, but also the book as a whole too.