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 The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg to spark deep thinking, creative storytelling, and rich discussion in your classroom. This thought-provoking book invites readers to explore a collection 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.
With its minimal text and rich illustrations, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick invites students to determine which clues are the most important for understanding each story. This resource set encourages readers to analyze whether the key detail is found in the title, the caption, or the visual imagery. By deciding what matters most on each page, students learn how to focus their attention, organize their thinking, and identify the elements that drive meaning and interpretation.
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick is the perfect tool for helping students practice making inferences. With each page offering only an illustration, a title, and a short caption, readers must draw conclusions about characters, settings, and events using visual and textual clues. Students are encouraged to ask themselves: What might be happening here? What is the deeper meaning of Burdick's word? What can I infer about the character's feelings? This strategy helps students dig beneath the surface, develop theories, and use evidence to support their ideas.
This resource set uses The Mysteries of Harris Burdick to strengthen students' ability to make thoughtful predictions based on limited information. Each mysterious image and caption prompts readers to imagine what might happen next or what events may have led to the moment captured on the page. Through guided questions, students practice combining what they see with what they know to make logical, creative predictions—and revise them as new ideas emerge. This strategy builds curiosity, flexibility, and confidence in interpretation.
The introduction to The Mysteries of Harris Burdick offers students an opportunity to practice retelling and summarizing using informational text that sets the stage for a literary mystery. Readers learn about Harris Burdick's sudden disappearance and the discovery of his puzzling illustrations—each one a story without a story. This resource guides students through identifying the most important details in the introduction and discovering Chris Van Allsburg's purpose for writing this book.
This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg as a springboard for instruction focused on synonyms.
By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how synonyms are used inside of the text before engaging in both guided and independent practice with synonyms.
This set of vocabulary development resources for The Mysteries of Harris Burdick highlights the words that are most important for students to know and understand while reading the book. Through engaging in fun word games, matching words to definitions and pictures, and practicing how to categorize words, students will develop the vocabulary necessary to comprehend this story and many others.
Inspired by The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, this activity challenges students to look closely at an illustration and think deeply about its setting, mood, and moment in time. Students will then create their own title and caption to pair with the picture, sparking imagination and building creative writing skills.
The award-winning author of Jumanji and The Polar Express, Chris Van Allsburg, challenges young readers to use their creativity and imagination in this one-of-a-kind book that asks readers to finish the story.
When author-illustrator extraordinaire Harris Burdick goes missing, all he's left behind are a series of images with accompanying captions, ideas for separate picture books.
But what can a picture of a nun quietly sitting in a chair floating in a cathedral have to do with a caption that says, "THE SEVEN CHAIRS: The fifth one ended up in France?"
Enticed to come up with their own endings, readers will marvel at the mystery behind these lasting drawings and the charm of an everchanging narrative.
Caldecott medal winner Chris Van Allsburg's call for readers to write their own stories will enthrall young minds again and again.
