The Drop Goes Plop (Non-fiction, Year 2)

'The drop goes plop' (by Sam Godwin and Simone Abel) is a non-fiction story which provides a captivating first look at the water cycle through a remarkable journey of a drop of water. This book is also recommended by our Curriculum Guidelines. 

In the story, a mum and a baby seagull follow a single "drop that goes plop" on an adventure through the water cycle. The didactic story provides a practical model of the water cycle from a bird's-eye view. 

What we can work in the classroom with this book is, therefore, very obvious: the water cycle. We can work, for example, with Kidspiration Software to design the cycle, as we did with the butterfly cycle in 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar'. 

In our case, we work with OWL charts.

OWL CHARTS

Observe, Wonder, Learned

The OWL chart is a tool for students to develop strong thinking skills. OWL are the initial letters of Observe, Wonder and Learn. These charts are widely used in Science. With 'The drop goes plop' we've use the chart for the children to pose questions about the different stages and facts of the water cycle. We use Kidspiration Software but, in this case, I'm an advocate of the use of low-tech technology. I think it is more much better if the children can draw their own pictures with their crayons and just write on the back of the sheet. 

This is the example in Kidspiration we used:

Picture View (children have to draw)

Writing View (to explain the pictures)

We could also elicit questions by showing key pictures to the children. Some pictures we can show would be a cloud, a tap, a water tower, pipes,...

To download this example and a few more, click on the picture

READING THEATRE

This story and topic gave us the opportunity to work with the script of a reading theatre. The script we used is well-known in British and American schools and can be found on the Internet. You can DOWNLOAD THE SCRIPT HERE. The children can create their own masks and other props to performance - we used even a blue towel pretending to be water. Although we recorded our performances, I think it's better I you see one carried out by children (from YouTube):