This picturebook is an accordion book; its foldable quality challenges its reader to reconsider what a picturebook is and what a picturebook can ‘do’. This picturebook is well-suited to group work as it can be unfolded upright on a surface and studied from every angle. This enables the reader to feel a sense of agency over the narrative, adding an embodied sense to the reading experience. The visual narrative is subtle, providing more of a snapshot of a moment in a larger, imagined narrative than an overall story. A man stands atop a block of ice somewhere in the Arctic. Why is the block of ice loose from the nearby iceberg? Is it melting? The man is crafty – using other pieces of ice, he turns the block into a barge, to sail away. The picturebook sits in the shadow of important themes such as the loss of ice in the arctic, climate change, and the diaspora. The picturebook is suitable as a catalyst for the creation of comparable artefacts in the second stage of the classroom project, because children will be challenged by the premise of the accordion book. The form has an easy aptitude for creative play in
the classroom, as children create their own in response to CAF terms.
