Use The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg to strengthen your students' comprehension skills, build their vocabulary, and help them understand how words work.
Use this captivating resource to spark deep thinking, creative storytelling, and rich discussion in your classroom. This thought-provoking collection invites readers to explore a series of mysterious illustrations, each paired with a single caption and title—but no full story. Students must rely on their imagination and critical thinking to uncover what might be happening in each scene.
This resource set includes comprehension question sets that help students practice Making Inferences, Making Predictions, and Determining Importance as they explore the visual and textual clues on each page. It also features a Retelling and Summarizing set focused on the book's introduction, helping students understand the mystery behind Harris Burdick's disappearance and the origin of the illustrations.
To support vocabulary development, the resource set includes a unique word work lesson on synonyms that challenges students to explore the descriptive language used in the captions and brainstorm alternative words with similar meanings. An extension activity gives students the opportunity to step into the shoes of Harris Burdick by imagining and writing their own mysterious caption and illustration pairing—bringing their creativity and narrative skills to life.
