David Wiesner’s wordless, imaginative and exuberantly detailed picture book, Flotsam (Clarion Books, 2006), is a joy to share with children at KS2. Look at a map and find your closest beach. How far away is it? How could you travel there? How long might the journey take? Make a glossary of sea-themed words, including vocabulary from the book’s title and blurb (e.g. flotsam, floating, ashore, barnacle). Whole Class Reading resources and planning for Year 2, in a zip file based on David Wiesner’s ‘Flotsam’. This book will link well to any seaside topic and has links to the KS1 Geography curriculum of continents and oceans. Vocabulary, Prediction, Clarification, Retrieval and Inference and are all covered in this unit. This unit could easily be extended into numerous more lessons including many incidental writing opportunities for descriptive settings, diary writing and letters. The book has endless possibilities.

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.This book is another winner, all about a child on a beach day with his parents. Other children may scream and run into the waves, but this boy has his microscope with him as he inspects the various forms of life in sand and water. Then he finds a curious looking camera, old but strange. Inside is a roll of film, so he runs to the one-hour photo place down the street and has it developed. When he eagerly gets the finished prints, he is astonished at what he finds. The camera has captured life under the waves as never seen before. Explain that they’re going to create an imaginary undersea creature, using pegs to secure their objects together. Meet unexpected underseas denizens and enter fascinating worlds within worlds in this entrancing celebration of imagination, creativity, and the impulse to share that which delights and amazes us. What might these cameras have seen on their journeys through time? Encourage children to become more imaginative in their thinking. Add to your collection of words, this time thinking of the best adjectives and similes to describe the cameras and what they represent.

How would these creatures move? With each child holding part of the creature, groups must animate them like puppets, making them swim around the room.

The camera concept feels very familiar to me. I'm sure I've seen this but with a camera phone. The discoverer took pictures of themselves and then left the phone to be discovered by someone else. The phone travelled all over the world. I just can't remember where I saw this, whether it was a news item or part of a TV show. How about visiting your nearest beach to identify and observe the wildlife? Or, you could conduct a survey of rubbish washed up by the tide, researching topics such as flotsam and beach combing. 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. American Library Association: American Library Association announces literary award winners. URL accessed 27 January 2007,

In the same place, close to trees and plants that will change with the seasons, photograph a different child at weekly intervals.Borrow some old-fashioned cameras and ask children to explore them. Weigh and measure the cameras, as if they are scientific specimens and make notes about the materials used. Describe what can be seen, felt and heard. Draw the cameras from different angles, as accurately as possible.

Flotsam is a children's wordless picture book written and illustrated by David Wiesner. Published by Clarion/Houghton Mifflin in 2006, it was the 2007 winner of the Caldecott Medal; [1] the third win for David Wiesner. The book contains illustrations of underwater life with no text to accompany them. The Unforgotten Coat by Frank Cottrell Boyce – This book about a girl’s friendship with a Mongolian refugee is illustrated with photographs that make the everyday world seem exotic. Divide the class into small groups. Give each a selection of three items, plus access to as many clothes pegs as they need. This is a three-week Writing Root for Flotsam by David Wiesner in which children dicsover a range of ‘Flotsam’ items (either after a visit to the seaside, or that have appeared in the classroom). One item is a camera that contains mysterious photographs that the children must investigate. These photos come from the book Flotsam by David Wiesner. Children go on to read and reflect on the book, making predictions and retelling orally and in writing. Later in the sequence of learning, the children have the opportunity to create their own sequel to the story, called Jetsam, where they write the story of the child who next finds the camera. As an optional additional study, this could also link to a study of the history of cameras and report writing about this and could include a historical link about the way cameras have changed the way history is recorded. Synopsis of Text: Wave by Suzy Lee – a wordless picture book to encourage thoughtful exploration, discussion and the development of visual literacy.What are these creatures called? What are their habitats and life cycles? Ask children to draw and write about them, creating entries for an encyclopedia about newly discovered underwater life.