Tag Archives: Peg Gignoux

Storied Planets

One of the books we read during language arts class at Durham Academy is The Last Cuintista by Donna Barba Higuera. The Last Cuentista is about a girl named Petra Peña who, along with her family and hundreds of others, has to travel to a different planet to escape from an incoming asteroid that would soon destroy Earth. After waking up on the ship in which she left home, Petra realizes she is the only person who remembers Earth and must use storytelling to keep both her Hispanic heritage and overall human history alive. An important theme in The Last Cuentista is how keeping stories going is vital to understanding the history of humans. In addition, stories are vital in learning and understanding more about people and their culture in general.

After this 3 month long book project, my language arts class took up another challenge, creating our very own ideal worlds. During this project, I imagined a whole semi-realistic (but not really) world, wrote a report on my planet, its political system, and things you can do there, and drew an illustration of my WHOLE planet. Overall, I enjoyed this project because of the creativity I could put into it from imaging and designing my planet to writing a six paragraph report about my planet’s goats and Glacier Frost Gatorade Cherry river.

I may have enjoyed this part of creating my very own Ideal World, but what came after this was even better… turning our six paragraph report into a 3D handmade book! We cut, glued, and painted with the help and support from the well known artist, Peg Gignoux! We started this book by akua ink printing on several different pieces of paper from graph paper to music pieces. After this, we cut out different shapes to get ready for the next step, gluing and collaging. We started gluing and collaging the different shapes and sizes of paper we cut out earlier into rocket ships, Gatorade rivers, aliens, and anything else you can imagine! Finally, after we were all finished with the insides of our 3D books, we glued on the cover, decorated them, and added the finishing touches to all of our amazing, creative, and kind of sticky, 3D books.

I would just like to give a big thanks to Peg Gignoux for helping me create my 3D Ideal world and Mrs. Donnelly for both planning the whole unit and for helping me keep my writing neat and legible.