Flotsam

Flotsam by David Wiesner

Ages 5 & up

5 stars

            A young boy discovers an underwater camera that floated onto the beach.  He develops the film and finds out that this camera has been to a lot of places over a long period of time. 

            I absolutely loved this book.  The pictures are so vivid, and you are left starring at them for a really long time.  One of my favorite pages is the page showing the second photograph.  It is of octopuses reading in armchairs, fish listening on the couch, and there is even a coffee table, a fishbowl, and lamps.  The best part of this page is in the background you see an upside down truck that is crumpled a little, and on the side of it, it says Bob’s Moving and Storage.  So one can infer that all this furniture got to the bottom of the sea by a moving truck crashing. After finishing the book, I notice on the cover of the book, in the glare of the fishes eye you can see the camera.  Little details like this can be found on every page of this book.

            I also enjoyed when he found the picture of the girl, and uses his microscope to see the picture within the picture.  I found myself flipping back to see the original, and how much I could see.  This book was so enjoyable for me, I wanted to spread the word by having a couple of my friends (who are not elementary teachers) look at the book.  And one of my friends said they could relate to the little boy in the book because when they were young they were very curious about nature and had a sort of nerdy attitude. 

            I feel that this book would be useful resource in the classroom.  Just this semester I have found a new awareness of wordless books and how powerful they can be.  For a post activity to reading the book, you could have the students brainstorm about what flotsam might be, and even what the cover of the book is.  To be honest, before I read the book I thought the cover, at a glance, looked like the robot light, HAL, from 2001 Space Odyssey.  Then after you read the book, discuss with students how they might change their meaning/definition of flotsam and share with them the true definition.