Chris Van Allsburg Mystery Cache

This is a mystery geocache. Please do not look for the container at the posted coordinates. This should not be very easy, although I may have overestimated it.

This is patterned after a lesson I used to do with second graders on completion of a Chris Van Allsburg unit, one that took us several months as we read his stories, remarked on his artistic styles, and tried to figure out what the story was really about. Was the injured man in The Stranger supposed to be Jack Frost? Did Mr. Gasazi really turn Fritz into a duck? Why were there crayon marks all over the pages of Bad Day at Riverbend?

They were fascinated by the white dog in his stories and there was always a competition as to who could find him first. Our final lesson included posting pictures all over the library and the students had to identify which books they came from.

Chris Van Allsburg is a famous author/illustrator, but perhaps you did not know that he was born in Grand Rapids and graduated from the University of Michigan, majoring in sculpture. He then went on to study at RISD in Rhode Island, and became interested in writing after his wife showed some of his drawings to book editors.

He has won two Caldecott Medals for U.S. picture book illustration, for Jumanji (1981) and The Polar Express (1985), both of which he also wrote and were later adapted as successful motion pictures. He was also a Caldecott runner-up in 1980 for The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. For his contribution as a children's illustrator he was 1986 U.S. nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition for creators of children's books. He lives in Providence. Rhode Island, with his wife and two daughters.

From Chris Van Allsburg:

The first story that I wrote, The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, had a dog in it named Fritz. When I thought about the kind of dog I wanted Fritz to be, I decided he should be a bull terrier. Unfortunately, I didn't know any bull terriers that could be my model for drawing pictures. I found some photographs, but they were not what I needed. What I needed was a real dog. My brother-in-law, David, visited one day, and told me he was thinking of getting a dog, possibly a golden retriever. I told him he should get himself something more interesting. Something really unusual. I showed him photos of bull terriers and he agreed that it was a most unusual and appealing dog.

Not long after that, he acquired a bull terrier puppy, and named him Winston. Winston became the model for Fritz, and because he was my brother-in-law's dog, I thought of Winston as a kind of nephew. Sadly, Winston had an accident that sent him to the big dog kennel in the sky at a young age. I decided to commemorate the contribution he made to my first book by including him (or at least a tiny part of him) in all of my books.