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| 3/15/2010 |  | |||||
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Deforestation
This unit should take 4-6 hours, depending on time, interest, and extension activities. It is designed for advanced level students age 14 and above. Objectives Students will: Materials to Print Activities Activity I: Forests (15 minutes) Ask students to brainstorm words and phrases that have to do with forests. Then ask them to write a few sentences about the forest. Tell them they can write whatever they want (poem, story, description, ...), as long as it has to do with a forest. Insist that grammar is not important here, that you just want them to get their thoughts on paper. After they finish, ask a few students to read what they have written to the class. Activity II: Pre-reading (15 minutes) Hand out copies of Printout I. Ask students to circle the words they don't know. Ask students to guess what the words mean. Ask for definitions from the students. Once you have a few suggestions for each word, provide the correct definition. Tell them the vocabulary is taken from the passage they are about to read. Ask them to make predictions about the reading and what it will be about. Activity III: Reading (10 minutes) Hand out copies of Printout II. Have students read quietly in class. Then have them answer the questions in class. Activity IV: Fact Finding (30 minutes) As a homework assignment, ask students to use the Internet, library or local preservation league to answer the questions on Printout 3. They can use the following websites or find their own resources. Suggested websites: Trees of Time and Place, Forestry, Forestworld, Forest Conservation Archives and Portal, and/or Infonations Activity V: Discussion (20-30 minutes) Begin a discussion of deforestation by asking the students to brainstorm what they think is the biggest threat to forests in their area (farming, foresting, disease, weather, etc.) and what they would do to change it. Ask a few students to share their thoughts with the class as a start to the discussion. Then ask students to plan how they would lobby for change (write letters, petition, plant trees, organize demonstration, raise money, etc.) and exactly who and what they would want to change. If the discussion is not working, break the students into groups and give them 15 minutes to come up with an answer. Then ask them to share their discoveries with the class. Activity VI: Grammar (15 minutes) Write the following sentence on the board: When she was in college, Maya Lin designed a monument. Ask students to locate the subject (Maya Lin) and the main verb (designed). Ask them what the main clause is (Maya Lin designed a monument). Ask them why the other half of the sentence (When she was in college) is not the main clause. Explain to them that sentences become more interesting and complicated when subordinate clauses are added to single clauses. Then hand out copies of Printout IV. Ask students to find the main subject and the main verb of the sentences. Activity VII: Story Game (20 minutes) Cut out the sentences from Printout V and give students the first half of the first sentence to a story about a forest. Make sure that each student has a different first sentence than his or her neighbor. Ask each student to finish the sentence as if it were the beginning of a long story. Then have that student pass the sentence to the right. Ask students to read the sentence and then add a dependent or independent clause to the new story they have just received. Continue this system but allow the students to read only one sentence before the one they are working on. When the paper has traveled all the way around the room the student who finished the first sentence should have the same story again. Ask students to finish the story with one or two sentences and then read them aloud to the class. If you have time, try the exercise again orally, asking each student to add one sentence to a story about a forest. Activity VIII: Tree Planting (1-20 hours) Have students plan and enact a tree planting event. Allow them to determine the scope of the project. If outdoor tree planting is impossible, bring plants into the classroom or plan a symbolic planting ceremony by getting students to draw a wall mural of a forest. Ask students to decide why they are planting trees (to represent local loss, national loss, global, etc.) and how many trees they should plant. They should have a specific reason for the number of trees (1% of the trees cut down every day, etc.). Each student should be responsible for three minutes of the actual ceremony. Each one can read something he/she has written or give statistics about deforestation. Activity VI: Reflection (20 minutes) Once they have had their tree-planting ceremony, ask students to reflect on the planning and the ceremony itself. Ask them to write about what they learned and how they felt. They can read them aloud if they want or they can simply pass them in to the teacher. |