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Using Shaun Tan's book the Arrival in the classroom. Free lesson plans and ideas to incorporate Shaun Tan's book "the Arrival" into your classroom.

Over the last month I've shown the picture that you see to the left during a number of presentations and workshops. I've used the picture to model using pictures to spark students' minds at the beginning of lessons on search strategies. This is a strategy that I've developed by borrowing ideas from Daniel Russell's Search ReSearch activities and Dan Meyer's strategy of using videos and pictures to prompt students to ask math questions.

"Shaun Tan's picture books have won numerous awards and been adapted to theater and animated film. His stunning wordless graphic novel The Arrival depicts the immigrant experience with unforgettable emotional impact. Get to know this illustrator from Perth, Australia by watching our November 2007 video interview. Learn how he got his start as a children's book illustrator, how he developed his ideas for The Arrival, and what inspired his vision for the book. Tan also describes the meaning behind a few key drawings in The Arrival, and offers advice for young artists."

Some activity ideas for Shaun Tan the arrival as well as other picture story books. 

Overview of the book 

The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope.

Sofia and her friend Mareka are watching Professor Julius Sumner Miller's television science show, Why is it so? Janice arrives and meets Sofia's mother and grandmother. She needs Sofia to translate the conversation and Sofia deliberately tells each party the wrong translation

"Students will create their own message in their alphabet"