Sector 7

Sector 7 is a wordless picture book written and illustrated by Caldecott winning author David Wiesner. This book is a Caldecott honors book. The target audience of the book is boys and girls from preschool through late elementary school.

David Wiesner

-Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars *****

-Summary: A boy travels to the Empire State Building on a school fieldtrip but the building is entirely covered with clouds. The boy makes friends with one of the clouds and together they adventure to Sector 7 in the sky where clouds are formed and come to life.

I absolutely love David Wiesner and his book and Sector 7 is no exception, this book is great! The illustrations are so lively they seem to jump off the page at you. The amount of detail is incredible and so realistic. Without any words, it leaves the interpretation of the story up to the reader, which makes it appealing to a large audience. The idea behind the story is about clouds and how they are made. Who hasn’t looked up into the sky before and tried to imagine what the clouds could be? That is the central idea this story is getting at. After reading this book you can’t really look at clouds the same way anymore. Even though there are not any words, there are enough pictures in sequential order that the reader is still fully capable to figuring out what the story is about and how it is progressing. It is an easy read but capable of having complexity depending on how you view the pictures and interoperate the story.

Wordless picture books are a great tool for the classroom. Wordless picture books give readers a chance to use their imaginations and make up their own text to a story line that goes along with the illustrations. I am definitely going to utilize wordless picture books, such as Sector 7 in my classroom. I want to give my students an opportunity to use their own minds instead of always having an author spell out what exactly is or should be going on in the story. I have used this book with second grade students before and they loved being able to make up their own version of the story by looking at the pictures. The two boys I worked with both had different ideas of what the story is about and it was so interesting to hear their ideas and how much they can differ from student to student. In my future classroom the activity I would do to go along wit this book would be a writing activity where students are required to make up their own storyline. It can be used in a variety of different ways. Student can practice writing dialogue by creating their own conversations between characters or they can practice using descriptive words and creative writing by incorporative a lot of imagery and adjectives in their writing. Using wordless picture books can also be used with any grade in elementary school. From first through fifth or sixth grade a variety of writing styles and difficulty can be put to use through wordless picture books. Any age student can fall in love with the illustrations and let their minds wander. As an adult reader I was fascinated by this book and found myself being creative as I went a lot with the story. This book could also be used with a science until talking about how clouds are made and the ideas behind the water cycle. Even though this book has a fictional way of creating clouds, it can still be used in reference to how real clouds are made. I highly recommend this book for any classroom.