Ocean Meets Sky: 1

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This is lesson 1 from a three-week+ Lesson set Overview and outcomes: based within the context of Ocean Meets Sky by the Fan Brothers. I’ve poured my heart and soul into making these PowerPoints beautiful to see, easy to use, resource and understand. The lessons are definitely suitable for Lower KS2, and can work wonderfully with minimal adaptation for Upper KS2 also (my Y6 colleague confirmed this).

From the creators of The Night Gardener, comes a stunning new picture book about a young boy who sets sail to find a place his grandfather told him about... the spot where the ocean meets the sky. I was really intrigued by the cover of this one. The illustrations looked gorgeous, and some of them are. I wasn't absolutely in love with the story, though, and the writing had some problems. It's a good day for sailing. Finn lives by the sea and the sea lives by him. Every time he looks out his window it's a constant reminder of the stories his grandfather told him about the place where the ocean meets the sky. Where whales and jellyfish soar and birds and castles float. Finn's grandfather is gone now but Finn knows the perfect way to honor him. He'll build his own ship and sail out to find this magical place himself! And when he arrives, maybe, just maybe, he'll find something he didn't know he was looking for. About This Edition ISBN: Author/Illustrator Study. Gather other books the Fan Brothers have authors and illustrated or just illustrated including The Night Gardener and The Antlered Ship . Compare the text and illustrations across the books. Students may particularly notice the use of color to create a whimsical effect across the books and the ways in which the Fan Brothers use a palette reflective of nature. Gather a variety of colored pencils, graphite pencils, and pens to have students incorporate the colors of nature into their illustrations of fictional stories to create whimsical effects by blurring parts of the landscape.I liked this book a lot. The whimsical steampunk-ish illustrations are brimful of charming details that could keep any adult or child reader engrossed for hours -- a truly inspired mix of whale, fish, bird, and ship imagery. The story is an ambitious blend of light and heavy, realistic and dreamy: it concerns a small boy, Finn, whose grandfather has recently passed away in his old age. Finn reminisces on his loving relationship with his grandfather, a raconteur whose fantastical stories nourished the young boy's imagination. In what is ultimately revealed to be a dream, Finn builds a boat and undertakes a solo nautical journey, assisted by a talking fish guide, in the hopes of reuniting with his grandfather in the paradise where "ocean meets sky"; along the way, he encounters some visually lovely mythic islands populated by book-reading birds and giant shells. In the end, his mother affectionately wakes him up for dinner; though he is never able to reunite with his grandfather in the way he most desires, he is sustained in his bereavement by the power of imagination and the loving presence of his family. Children find a mysterious box in the classroom labelled Grandpa’s Stuff. Inside they will find clues to who Grandpa was and his relationship with the main character, Finn. Finn misses his Grandfather after he has passed away and longs to travel to the fantastical worlds that his Grandpa would tell him about in his stories. Finn builds a boat on what would have been his grandfather's ninetieth birthday. It whisks him away on a magical adventure, eventually leading him to the place his grandfather talked about: where the ocean meets the sky. The story itself is fine; as a dream/fantasy, it works. The reader can clearly see how much Finn and his grandfather loved each other, even if the grandfather isn't even present in most of the book. Unlike Ida and the Whale, another picture book about a magical journey that I just read, the goal is more clearly spelled out. Finn really wants to find the place his grandfather talked about. I did like how that journey had a well-defined end. I'm just not sure if the story held my interest as an adult reader. The book, Ocean Meets Sky, is beautiful. I have used these PP lessons with my Year 3 class and had incredible work created by them. Their level of thinking and inferencial work has blown me away, along with their writing. The work actually lasted me an entire term to get through - 6 weeks. There is more than a single lesson’s worth of work within each PowerPoint. Children are given a variety of meaningful writing opportunities throughout the sequence and gradually build up the skills to write an extended fantasy story of their own.

And indeed, not really all that much if at all focussing (except for some textual reassurance if required) on the Fan brothers’ printed words but rather on their large and mostly glowingly luminous illustrations has made me not only appreciate but also absolutely love and cherish Ocean Meets Sky. For the pictures are not only truly aesthetically marvellous and visually rich, they also evocatively and engagingly show young Finn’s dreamlike sailing journey to where according to his deceased grandfather the ocean meets the sky as both an absolute visual delight and equally paying homage to the memory of his grandfather, full of whimsy, full of magic, full of unbridled imagination (with the added sweetness that upon waking from his sailing dream, Finn is told that he and his family will be dining on his grandfather’s special dumplings).

This beautiful and poignant story has stunning illustrations throughout (matched in the PowerPoints) and explores themes of family, memory and loss. The unit begins by introducing the authors to the children and highlighting the power of bookmaking/storytelling. mysterious box in the classroom labelled “Grandpa’s Stuff”. Inside they will find clues to who Grandpa was and his relationship with the main character, Finn. Finn misses his Grandfather after he has Here's how special this book is: my toddler, who has never experienced the death of a loved one and therefore has no idea about the process of grief and healing, understands what is going on in this book. While it is never explicitly stated that Finn's grandfather has passed, and never says that Finn misses him, my son understood. At one point during our second or third reading he said, "I miss my grandpa too!" Thankfully, his grandpas and his great-grandpa are all still with us, but I was amazed that the Fan brothers managed to convey this so clearly through the sparse text and the illustrations...well enough that a two-year-old understood that Finn was experiencing loss. That's really something.