Seacole

From Raindrops to Rivers: What is a droplet's journey?

This term year 4 have been learning all about the water cycle and the formation of rivers. They focused on the Amazon River and the River Thames and compared and contrasted their features. In their art and PBL lessons, the children created backdrops to show the different stages of a water droplet's journey from evaporation, along a river's course to its return to the ocean. They then used stop frame animation to show the movement of the droplet around the water cycle and narrated the process over the top using a script that was written in a documentary style during their English lessons.

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We learned about features of a river, including the source of the river.

We started by learning about the different parts of a river, and the process of the water cycle.

We worked really hard on learning about the features of a non-chronological report. We had to find technical vocabulary and research interesting facts about the Amazon Rainforest. We divided up our report into paragraphs such as "Location", "Local People", "Animals" and "Plants".

We wrote non-chronological reports about the Amazon Rainforest.

We started off by storyboarding our section of the water cycle, drawing detailed pictures for each stage and then thinking carefully about what materials we would need to create them. With our partner we then made a prototype out of paper first and then started to create our larger, final backdrop out of sugar paper, tissue paper and card.

We began to storyboard our scripts for our documentaries.

To write our documentary style scripts we watched some David Attenborough nature documentaries and created a word bank of the words and phrases he uses that might be helpful for our script. We then mapped out the different stages of our script before writing it in detail. We made sure our script included directions for what would be moving in the stop motion, as well as the words the narrators would need to say over the top.

We wrote our scripts in pairs, focusing on one stage of the journey of a river.

We compared rivers in two different places in the world.

In our Art and Design lessons we learned the skills to create backdrops for our stop frame animation. In our Project lessons we learned how to develop these skills and explore stop frame animation technology.

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