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Reading passage Kindergarten English Language Arts

One Drop at Whistlebrook Farm: A Kindergarten Read-Aloud

An original kindergarten read-aloud about a drop of water that rises from a farm puddle, joins a cloud, and falls back to the farm as rain, with oral questions.

Objectives

  1. Students will listen to a read-aloud story and recall two stated facts from it.
  2. Students will retell the four stops the drop makes in the order they happened.
  3. Students will tell how the drop got back to the barn at the end of the story.

Vocabulary

Cloud
A cloud is a visible mass of tiny water droplets or ice crystals floating in the sky. Clouds form when water vapor cools and condenses onto tiny particles of dust or salt in the air.

Also: puddle, pail, drop

Teacher overview

This original story follows one drop of water at Whistlebrook Farm, a fictional farm, from a puddle by the barn up into a cloud and back down as rain, which fills the goats' pail and leaves a new puddle by the barn. Read it aloud rather than assigning it as independent reading, and let students answer the questions by speaking, pointing, or drawing, since the goal at this age is listening comprehension rather than decoding. Kindergartners frequently say that a puddle only soaks into the ground when it disappears, and the middle of the story is written to give the class a second answer to hold alongside that one.

Read the story twice: once straight through, and a second time pausing after each paragraph for the matching question.

One Drop at Whistlebrook Farm: A Kindergarten Read-Aloud — Kindergarten English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Passage

One Drop at Whistlebrook Farm

By the red barn at Whistlebrook Farm there was a puddle. One drop of water sat in that puddle. Tess fed the goats every day. She stepped past the puddle every day too.

Then the sun came up hot. It shone right on the puddle. The drop got warm. It got so warm that it went up. It rose into the air. Tess did not see it go. The puddle got small. By lunch the puddle was gone.

High up, the air was cold. The drop got cold too. It bumped into more drops. They all stuck together. They made a big white cloud. The cloud drifted over the farm.

The cloud got heavy. It could not hold all the drops. Rain fell on the barn roof. Rain fell on the grass. Rain ran off the roof into the pail by the goat pen.

Tess ran out with her hood up. She looked in the pail. It was full to the top. "I did not fill this," she said. Then she smiled. "The rain did."

The next day the sun came up hot again. A new puddle sat by the red barn. The drop was back where it started.

Questions

  1. Where was the puddle at the start of the story?
  2. Who feeds the goats at Whistlebrook Farm?
  3. What made the drop go up into the air?
  4. What did the drops make when they stuck together up high?
  5. What filled the pail by the goat pen?
  6. Tess said she did not fill the pail. Why did she smile?
  7. The drop ended up back by the barn. Tell how it got there.

Retelling task (draw and tell). Fold a page in four parts. Draw the drop in the puddle, then up in the air, then in the cloud, then falling as rain. Tell a grown-up the story in that order. Then tell one word for how you felt when the pail was full.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: By the red barn. The first sentence places the puddle beside the red barn at Whistlebrook Farm.
  2. Answer: Tess. The opening paragraph says Tess fed the goats every day and stepped past the puddle.
  3. Answer: The hot sun. The second paragraph says the sun shone on the puddle, the drop got warm, and then it rose into the air.
  4. Answer: A cloud. The third paragraph says the drops stuck together and made a big white cloud.
  5. Answer: The rain. The fourth paragraph says rain ran off the roof into the pail by the goat pen, and Tess found it full.
  6. Answer: Because the rain did the job for her. Accept any answer showing the student understood that Tess was pleased the rain filled the pail instead of her.
  7. Answer: The sun lifted it into the air, it joined a cloud, and then it fell back down as rain. Accept a shorter version that keeps the up-and-down idea, such as "it went up and came back down as rain."

Retelling task answer. Answers will vary. Accept any four-part drawing that keeps the puddle, the air, the cloud, and the rain in that order, plus one feeling word such as happy, surprised, or glad.

Differentiation

Support

Read the story a third time in one-paragraph chunks and ask one yes-or-no question after each ("Was the sun hot or cold?"). For the retelling task, hand out the four boxes already drawn on the page with a small picture cue in each corner, so students only need to fill them in and say the order.

Extension

Ask confident students to tell what will happen to the new puddle by the barn the next hot day, and to explain their answer with something from the story. Invite them to add a fifth box to the retelling page showing that next step.

ELL supports

Pre-teach puddle, cloud, pail, and drop with a gesture for each: hands spread low and flat for the puddle, arms rounded overhead for the cloud, a cupped hand for the pail, and one finger tapping down for the drop. Allow students to answer questions 1 through 5 by pointing to a picture, and accept single-word answers throughout.

Extensions

Put a shallow dish of water in a sunny window and a matching dish in a shady corner, and check both each morning for three days. Ask which dish is emptier, and connect the answer back to the sun that lifted the drop at Whistlebrook Farm.