Not a Box

Not a Box
by Antoinette Portis (2006)

         I was immediately drawn to this book because of its clever cover. The book is wrapped with brown paper all around to look like cardboard, there is a weight included next to the author's name, and the back has nothing but arrows with THIS SIDE UP printed on it. How clever. And when opening the book it was clear that the simple art style continued and meshed with the 'story' being told. The black-and-white real-world images of a bunny sitting in a box or standing on top of one are replaced by simple two-color illustrations that show the imagined objects the box has become. Because Portis still leaves the black outline of the box visible the imagined world seems somewhat tentative -- perhaps an adult trying to imagine what a child sees. For this reason adults may enjoy this book more than kids -- also because it lets us relive the times we could actually fit in a box of any kind -- but I think a lot of youngsters would get a kick out of yelling "It's NOT NOT NOT NOT a box!"
         Of course, the real fun that this book could bring to children would be the way they could stretch their own imagination to come up with the many things a box could be. After composing our own pages to If... by Sarah Perry in class the other day it was mentioned how great a book like Not a Stick would be for the same artistic page construction -- and having already read Not a Box I could imagine the possibilities. To keep the class book consistent you could even distribute black and white rectangles and bunny heads for children to arrange however they'd like on the page. They could continue with the simplicity of adding two additional colors, or add detail and colors not seen in the original book. Unlike a lot of art activities for younger children I've seen in classrooms, this would be a simple task that wouldn't create a ton of artifacts that look exactly the same except for the color choice scribbled on top of the pig's face (for example -- since I've seen it). Since there really is not a story here at all, this book mostly lends itself to art projects.

Here is an example of a Not a Box inspired art project I did with my 6-year-old reading buddy. Unfortunately it is cropped - but she decided to write "I say it is not a box!!" on her illustration of the box as a house:

I gave square pieces of paper with a box drawn in black permanent ink that was the same size as the one shown in the text. After she read me the book (excited to scream all the parts with exclamation marks) we worked on this project.