Flotsam: 1

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Its playful sophistication conveys a complexity of ideas that linger in the mind long after the book has been closed, encouraging discussion and inspiring all kinds of responses. 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. David Wiesner’s wordless, imaginative and exuberantly detailed picture book, Flotsam (Clarion Books, 2006), is a joy to share with children at KS2.

This can build into an exercise where half the class are ‘taunters’ on the beach, and half work together as the waves, ‘replying’ to them.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. 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. Later, you can focus on single illustrations or sequences of images as the starting point for other activities. 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:

Flotsam is a short and beautiful picture book, bound to delight both children and adults alike. It is a great book for children (of all ages) to read on their own and to read together with their older companions. You’ll need several copies of the book, so that children can follow the illustrations in small groups. Divide the class into small groups. Give each a selection of three items, plus access to as many clothes pegs as they need. David Wiesner’s illustrations are once again beautiful as he draws each character in a realistic way, especially of the images of the fishes doing human activities under the sea. The image that probably stood out the most was the image of the family of squids sitting around in their living room as the living room is set up like an underwater version of a living room as there are fish lamps all over the room. David Wiesner’s illustrations take control of telling this story, as there are no words to tell the story, just the images. David Wiesner’s story of a young boy discovering an underwater world is interesting and creative at the same time as the reader gets to see the human world from a fish’s perspective, as seashells take over as houses and turtles are used as transportations.Again, use the images (and messages, if there are any) to generate ideas about who these people could have been. Identify the geographical features of beaches and coastlines. Can you create a report about some of them? Try a sketching trip to the aquarium, or twin your class with a school overseas, exchanging pictures and stories and making new connections. Create some captions, speech and thought bubbles to accompany the beautiful illustrations in the book. 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.