Flora and the Flamingo

Teaching Ideas and Invitations

Grades K and up

• Precise Description with Verbs. As a class, brainstorm a list of action verbs that explain and describe what Flora and the flamingo are doing on each page. For younger grades, use interactive or shared writing to write the text of the story. Older grades can refer to this list in writing workshop. In either case, make sure to help students revise their writing by listing and using more vivid verbs.
• Precise Description of Character’s Emotions. Similar to the activity above, turn to any page in the book and brainstorm a list of emotions that the characters are feeling at that moment in the story. Make sure to discuss the difference in gradient of the different emotions, such as the
  difference between sad and dejected, happy and elated, to help students write more vividly.
• Partner Picture Walks and Storytelling. Wordless picture books are terrific tools for helping children develop their oral language and emergent reading skills. Have pairs of students sit side by side, each handling one side of the book (i.e., one handles the flamingo’s story, while the other handles Flora’s story), and encourage them to walk through the illustrations and tell the stories of what is happening on each page to each other. They can take turns with each page, or take turns telling an entire story. To emphasize the book’s interactive component, encourage them to also try telling the story differently if they flip the flaps down in a different order. You might also want to then have them do this with some of the other wordless picture books listed below in Further Explorations, such as Barbara Lehman’s The Red Book or Chris Raschka’s A Ball for Daisy.
• Choose Your Own Plotline. The genius of the book’s large interactive flaps is that readers can construct how Flora’s friendship with the flamingo develops in different ways. Walk students through the number of possibilities that could occur across a single scene in the story, such as the double-page spread where the flamingo notices Flora’s hurt and heartache after falling. Then have students write out the text of the story, choosing the order in which they flip over the flaps and ultimately decide how the story goes.

Grades 2 and up

• Animals that Dance. The animal world is full of species with unique dancing talents. Read some of the online articles and view some of the videos listed below in Further Explorations. As a class, discuss why different kinds of animals, including humans, dance. Then, read some of the picture books listed below for more creative tales of animals dancing. Have students select one of the animals from the articles or videos to be the subject of a picture book that they write and illustrate themselves.
• Dance as Metaphor. The act of dancing is a popular metaphor for many of life’s experiences and events. In Flora and the Flamingo, it’s primarily a metaphor for the development of a friendship. What other experiences can be described as a dance? To begin, help students analyze how Flora’s friendship with the flamingo begins, what challenges it faces, and what ultimately makes it a successful and smooth relationship. Then have students think about what’s involved in dancing: What do dancers need to do to keep the dance moving? What do they do when they stumble? What do they do when another person is their dancing partner? You might want to show your class different video clips of people dancing in pairs or groups from different cultures and using different dance styles. A  Venn diagram might help students then compare and contrast how a friendship is like a dance. Use similar questions and diagrams to help them identify other life experiences that could be described with the metaphor of dancing.

• Filmstrip Storytelling. The influence of Molly Idle’s previous experience as a film animator is obvious in Flora and the Flamingo, as each page feels like another scene in a fluid movie. Invite your students to study the techniques that authors use for storytelling when their medium is pictures. You may find Scott McCloud’s Making Comics a useful guide to examining the choices authors make when telling a story visually. The artist/ author makes decisions about which moments to feature, how to frame and focus the image (think camera lens), how to arrange the images to convey the flow of the story, and what medium and artistic style best match the content of the story. Have students create filmstrips of their own wordless stories, using either paper or digital storytelling software, filling each with only drawings of the scenes involved. For further examples of how the illustrations are linked together as scenes in wordless stories, check out Suzy Lee’s books Wave, Mirror, or Shadow, as well as the wordless picturebooks we’ve blogged about already on this site.
• Color and Mood in Picture Books. Picture book illustrators often use color to enhance the mood of the story. Molly Idle limits her use of color to shades of pink, brown, and yellow. Why do you think she chose those particular colors? What effect does this limited color palette have on the mood of the story? Share a variety of picture books with your students that effectively use color to highlight mood. Some examples include Molly Bang’s When Sophie Gets Angry… Really, Really Angry, David Shannon’s How Georgie Radbourn Saved Baseball, Jeanette Winter’s Mama, and Dr. Seuss’s My Many Colored Days.
• Illustrator Study. Molly Idle has written and illustrated a range of titles in addition to illustrating many books written by other authors. Gather multiple copies of her books to conduct an illustrator study. Survey Molly Idke’s illustrations, and identify her artistic style, her artistic idiosyncrasies, and favorite artistic media to use. Gather information about her from her websites listed below, your local librarian, the Internet, and as other biographical sources.

Further Explorations

Online Resources

Molly Idle’s website
http://idleillustration.com

Flora and the Flamingo book trailer
http://www.chroniclebooks.com/titles/flora-and-the-flamingo.html

Top 10 Animal Dance Moves – Earth Unplugged
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOksAFJajg8

6 Animals that Science Has Discovered Can Dance
http://theweek.com/article/index/243068/6-animals-that-science-has-discovered-can-dance

Scholastic Lesson Plan: Do the Animal Dance
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plan/activity-plan-mixed-ages-do-animal-dance

Strictly Animals Dancing
http://www.discoverwildlife.com/animals/strictly-animals-dancing

BBC Article – Are humans the only species that enjoy dancing?
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121030-lords-of-the-dance

Books

Baker, J. (2010). Mirror. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. See our entry at http://classroombookshelf.blogspot.com/2010/11/mirror.html