Chris Haughton is an Irish illustrator and he published his first book this past year. It's called A Bit Lost. It's a great one for the younger kids.
I read the story to the 1st graders and we looked closely at how Chris created motion in a couple scenes by using dot patterns. We also talked about how he created layers of space by overlapping shapes in his illustrations. The students picked up on a narrative pattern that Chris employed throughout the book, which I thought was pretty cool. They are identifying patterns in a variety of media and content areas.
The kids loved the story. A lot of laughing took place while we were going through it.
Once we read the book I guided the students through making a collage based on the above key scene from the story. We focused on overlapping, 3d space, cutting skills, and implied motion,
We worked our way from the the back of our collages to the front. Everything was cut paper except for the details on our owls and the motion pattern that depicted the owl's path from beginning to end.
