Lesson plan Kindergarten Art & Music
Juneberry School Pipe Path: A Blue Paper Strip Collage Lesson
A 40-minute kindergarten art lesson where children count and glue blue paper strips end to end to build one class collage of the pipe path from the tank to the sink.
Objectives
- Students will count out a set of long strips and a set of short strips and tell how many are in each set.
- Students will compare two groups of strips and say which group has more.
- Students will glue strips end to end to make one connected line across a shared collage.
Vocabulary
Key words: pipe, tank, path, strip
Teacher overview
Water arrives at a classroom sink through a pipe, and the pipe comes from somewhere. This lesson makes that path visible as one long blue line built by the whole class from paper strips, running from a gray tank at one end of the butcher paper to a gray sink at the other. A common kindergarten misconception is that water starts at the faucet, and a single unbroken line of strips shows otherwise more clearly than an explanation would.
The art skill is joining, which is demanding work at five. Strips must touch end to end with no gap, or the line breaks. A gap is easy for a child to spot, so the standard for a clean join is one the class can hold to without much prompting.
Each child works from a bag holding 5 long strips and 3 short strips. The counting and comparing questions on the handout come straight from that bag, so no child needs to look at anyone else's work to answer them.
Procedure
Minutes 0-6 - Where the sink water starts. Turn on the classroom tap for a moment, then turn it off. Read aloud: "Water came out of this tap. It did not start here. It came through a pipe. The pipe goes under the floor and under the street." Point to the taped butcher paper with the gray tank at the left end and the gray sink at the right end, and say the class job is to build the pipe between them.
Minutes 6-13 - Counting the bag. Give each child a bag. Children pour the strips out and sort them into a long pile and a short pile. Together, count the long pile aloud as a class, then the short pile. Ask which pile has more and how they know. Answers about matching one strip to one strip are worth naming out loud, because that is the strategy the handout wants.
Minutes 13-25 - Building the line. Call children to the butcher paper in groups of four. Each group glues its strips end to end, continuing from where the last group stopped, moving left to right from the tank toward the sink. Coach the joins directly: the new strip touches the last one, with no space between them. Long strips run straight, and short strips are useful for the turns around corners.
Minutes 25-34 - Filling the street above. Once the line reaches the sink, children draw houses, grass, and a road along the top half of the paper, above the pipe. Say the reason as they draw, which is that the pipe is buried underground while people walk above it. Stop the class once and ask everyone to trace the whole line with a finger from tank to sink. This is the formative check, and any child whose finger has to jump a gap should be given a short strip to patch it.
Minutes 34-40 - Handout and close. Children return to their seats and answer the four handout questions with you, using a spare bag of 5 long and 3 short strips at each table to recount. Read the finished collage together by walking a finger along the line while the class says tank, pipe, sink.
Student Handout
Answer with your table's spare bag of strips in front of you.
- Count the long blue strips in the bag. There are 5 of them. How many long strips are there?
- Count the short blue strips in the bag. There are 3 of them. How many short strips are there?
- You have 5 long strips and 3 short strips. Which group has more, the long ones or the short ones?
- You have 5 long strips and 3 short strips. Put them all together. How many strips is that in all?
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Answer Key
- Answer: 5 long strips. The child counts the long pile one strip at a time and says the last number counted, which is five.
- Answer: 3 short strips. Same one-to-one count on the short pile, ending at three.
- Answer: the long strips. Matching each short strip to a long strip leaves two long strips with no partner, so the long group has more. Accept a correct answer given by counting alone.
- Answer: 8 strips. Pushing the two piles together and counting the whole set gives eight, and 5 and 3 make 8.
Differentiation
Support (below grade level)
Give the child a bag with the strips already sorted into two smaller envelopes, one marked with a long line and one with a short line, so sorting does not consume the counting time. For gluing, draw a light pencil guideline across the butcher paper for that child's section so the strips have a track to follow.
Extension (above grade level)
Ask the child to add a branch line going up from the main pipe to a house drawn along the top, then say how many strips the branch took and whether that is more or fewer than the strips in the main run. These children can also label the tank and the sink with beginning sounds.
ELL supports
Build the vocabulary with objects rather than words: hold a paper towel tube and blow air through it while saying pipe, then point to the real classroom sink and tap while saying sink and tap. Long and short can be taught by holding two strips side by side without any sentence at all. Count the piles chorally in the home language first, then in English.
Extensions
Take the class on a five-minute walk to find pipes they can actually see, such as a downspout at the building corner, a hose bib on an outside wall, or an exposed pipe in the cafeteria ceiling. Add a paper tag to the collage for each pipe the class finds. Keep the collage on the wall through the unit and add a paper fire hydrant later when the class studies where firefighters get water.