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Grade Level: 3-4 Subject Areas: Reading, Visual Arts Setting: Classroom Skills: Creative thinking, story telling Prior Preparation: Have students list reasons why water is important. Review with them that many stories passed down through the ages are based on fact and some are based on fiction. Vocabulary: none South Dakota Education Standards for 4th grade: Reading 4.R.1.1; 4.R.1.2; 4.R.2.1; 4.R.2.2 Visual Arts Standard 1 |
Objective: Students will practice their story telling skills by developing their own water story. Materials: Topic themes, paper and pencil Background: Literature provides many examples of water ceremonies and celebrations, stories and poems, among diverse cultures. People through the ages particularly those in areas receiving unpredictable amounts of rain and experiencing floods or droughts have recognized their dependence on water. They know from stories of their ancestors, if not from their own experiences, that the unwatered crops shriveled and died, and that the people suffered. Rain was a mysterious and special phenomenon, because it connected the earth with the sky. Procedure: Have students create a one or two page story on one of the following water-related themes. Encourage them to illustrate their stores. "A day without water" "If I had all the Earth's fresh water, how would I use it wisely?" "Ways I could save water" "Ways I could stop people from polluting water" "Letter to the town's mayor about cleaning our local stream" "Water is important" "Swimming is fun" "Cool, clear water" "How clouds are made" "Rainy weather" "Water that flows across the land" "Once upon a time there was a raindrop" "Frog's day away from the pond" "Wendy Water arrests suspects!" "The lake at my house!" "Mr. William's wondrous, wacky, water-mobile" "Sliding in the mud" "The shower that slithered green slime (instead of water)!" "The dog that drank all the world's water" "Can I sit at the water table?" "Lonnie Lizard's lousy leaky pipe" "River raptors" "The day my mom packed watercress in my lunch" "The bucket that never ran out of water" Extensions: Read "The Rainstick - a fable" by Chisholm Robinson. Have students choreograph their own dance to celebrate rain, or have them construct instruments from materials in their environment to imitate the sound of rain, a river, or a waterfall. Hold a water symphony. Play "water detective". After discussing ways and places that water is saved and wasted, pair up the children to act out a water use. One partner is to show water saving, the other water wasting. The class tried to guess which is which. Create a water mural of the water cycle that graphically includes the statistics representing the relative amount of water in each component of the water cycle - ocean 97%, ice caps 2&, 1% all others. |