Cave Paintings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A young space traveler discovers art painted millennia before by a human being—just like him.
Our hero travels all alone on a spaceship, through the universe, past galaxies, comets and planets to go visit his grandmother on Earth for the summer holidays. She takes him to visit an ancient cave, where he discovers handprints and drawings of unknown animals made by human beings, just like him. To top off his wonderful holiday she gives him mysterious objects which once belonged to his grandfather — paper and crayons. On the way home he draws what he saw on his travels — to the amazement of his fellow passengers.
Jairo Buitrago’s thought-provoking story reminds us of what remains as everything changes. Rafael Yockteng’s fabulous art, a tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, presents us a wonderful, diverse future in which space travel is common, though knowledge of the past is still a secret treasure to be discovered.
Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.1
Ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.7
Use information gained from the illustrations and words in a print or digital text to demonstrate understanding of its characters, setting, or plot.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The pale-skinned child who narrates this story by previous collaborators Buitrago and Yockteng (Two White Rabbits) isn't fazed by the trans-galactic spaceship trip he takes in these pages; he does it all the time, "always traveling alone." At his destination planet, which readers will recognize as Earth, a small saucer flies him straight into the arms of his grandmother. Every spread juxtaposes natural and futuristic elements: in one, the boy and grandmother travel in a glass-domed vehicle to a preserve-like area, where she leads him into a cave full of paintings. A print of a human hand and images of animals impress him, and so does the grandmother's present of a family heirloom, a box of colored pencils "They were my grandfather's, and before that, his grandfather's." Making marks on paper has power that eons can't diminish; en route home, even the four-eyed passenger in the seat behind the protagonist is riveted by his sketching. Yockteng juggles different styles of artwork with ease magisterial views of whirling galaxies, pen-and-ink-style drawings of the boy's time with his grandmother, the cave art itself, and childlike sketches on the new pad all offer scope for the imagination. Ages 4 7.
