Book Sharing Monday

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg is "inspiration" in one word! It's a book that could be used to jump start your child's imagination. Either through other pictures, story telling, or writing the child can take the captivating caption, title and picture from each spread of the book and create!

The premise of the book is explained in the introduction. The Author of this book Chris Van Allsburg visited a man named Peter Wenders who is retired and use to work for a  children's book publisher. During his career he reviewed many books and book ideas from many authors. There was a man named Harris Burdick (or that is what he said his name was) who dropped off a bunch of his drawings with a title and a caption to go with each from each book that he had writen. Peter told Mr. Burdick that he wanted to see the stories that went with them as soon as possible but Mr. Burdick disappeared and was never seen, nor heard from again. When Chris Van Allsburg saw the captions and drawings he told Peter that it was hard not to think up stories to go with them and Peter fetched a box with dozens of stories inspired by Mr. Burdick's drawings. This book is comprised of some of his pictures with titles and captions. So, borrow this book from your library, read it to your kids and see what they come up with!

The picture of the house had the following title and caption.

THE HOUSE ON MAPLE STREET

It was a perfect lift off!