Flotsam (Caldecott Medal Book): A Caldecott Award Winner

Product Information

Flotsam is a great example of a wordless picture book that creates engagement through its detailed sequence of images, rather than its text and, as such, requires a high level of inference. The author and illustrator, David Wiesner, is famous for creating other wordless texts, such as Tuesday and Free Fall. Flotsam won the Caldecott Medal in 2007 as well as being recognised by several other awards, and was chosen as the New York Times best illustrated children’s book that year. At heart it is a humorous fantasy story that also looks closely at the cyclical nature of life, as well as the ultimate power of nature. Links and themes: Working in an open space, put large sheets of paper on the floor, each with a picture on it. Children should move around the room, looking at the pictures and generating interesting questions.

Postcards, setting descriptions, non- chronological reports, message in a bottle letters Main Outcome:Take the initial sequence of images where the boy is swamped by the wave and finds the camera, and the sequence at the end, where the boy is again splashed by the wave (which reclaims his pictures). Talk about the images with your class. How would it feel to be experiencing these events? Article for the Horn Book, David Wiesner. Accessed September 4, 2019. "A guy walked into my tenth-grade art class at Bridgewater-Raritan high school New Jersey, and changed my life. Sounds like the setup for a classic punch line, but this was no joke. The guy had graduated from my school two years earlier and was now a student at some place called the Rhode Island School of Design. He said it was an art school."

I then split the children into teams of 5 and 3 of the teams would take the ‘’for’ argument and the other 3 the ‘against’ argument. They worked together to create key phrases they would use in their arguments and made little cue cards as prompts when speaking. In total we had 3 debates and interestingly, a different stance won each time. It really showed the children the power that words have to persuade and make us change our mind. Collecting shells on the beach, a boy is caught by a wave. When it recedes, he finds an old-fashioned camera containing seemingly impossible scenes of underwater life. Using a camera with roll film, photograph close-up details of well-known landmarks in your neighbourhood, or views seen from an unusual angle. Flotsam” is a 2007 Caldecott Award winning book by David Wiesner, author of the popular books, “Tuesday” and “The Three Pigs.” In this story, a young boy discovers a mysterious camera from the sea that eventually shows him another world under the sea. “Flotsam” is surely one classic that cannot be beat.Talk about the idea of ‘six degrees of separation’. How many countries are your children connected with, via holidays or links with family and friends? How might you present this information in charts or diagrams?