The Deep Blue Sea: A Book of Colorswritten by Audrey Wood, illustrated by Bruce Wood. 2005. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Unpaged. (9780811879545)
Author/Illustrator Website: http://www.audreywood.com/
Media: digital illustration
Awards and Honors: none
Audience: pre-k
Annotation:
A colorful, cumulative story for pre-schoolers featuring a brightly illustrated tropical island and its inhabitants.
Personal Reaction:
Audrey Wood is a master at creating stories that appeal to very young children. Books like The Napping House and The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry and The Big Hungry Bear are well-known and loved by children and parents, teachers and librarians alike.
Wood's simple, immediate prose paired with the colorful and bold illustrations of her son, Bruce Wood, make The Deep Blue Sea a great choice for preschool aged kids. I'm not partial to digital illustrations, and I find the ones in this book a bit charmless, but they do have kid-appeal. Overall, the illustrations are eye-catching and work well with the story. With a cumulative story structure, The Deep Blue Sea is a good choice for a participatory storytime. It's also a color concept book and kids will jump at the opportunity to identify the colors of the various objects in the book as they are added to the pages, one by one.
Props and Flannels:
I created a flannel story to use with this book in storytime. Using full pieces of navy and sky blue colored felt, I first created a background. Then I created each object from the story so that I could add the pieces one by one onto the background. Typically I freehand my flannel board stories, using the books illustrations as reference, which is what I did here. I decided against creating the rain, the singing fish and the rainbow at the end of the story. These seemed to be actions as well as objects, and were either small or hard to represent using felt. Because I'm reading the book while I'm presenting the flannel board, I don't think the narrative is affected.
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