At one point, I turned off the car and listened to the pounding rain on the roof. Just 2 weeks ago, after looking at the needs of my students and attempting to "dovetail" on their classroom learning experiences, I planned a mini-3-4-session-thematic-teaching learning unit around drought. They had read a Scholastic News article on drought in their classrooms and had some background knowledge. I could use that background to support reading more in-depth text on droughts! I THOUGHT about adding a short article on flooding; then, I decided to stay focused on too little water. In my plans, however, I wrote my "goal" as "use details from the texts to explain the socio-economic power of water."
When I started the unit, last Thursday, I had to acknowledge the flooding in Texas. We watched a news clip flooding followed with a clip about droughts as our "launch." Then we started to become "experts" on droughts. And now, while our excess water is NOTHING like the devastation in Texas, we have way too much water right here on the East Coast as well And, it is supposed to rain all day tomorrow, too.
"So much for planning, thinking and learning about drought," I thought, as the rain pounded the roof of my car.
4 comments:
In my Celebration post last week I wrote about a friend's new book out, The Water Knife, for adults, about the future & water needs, how desperate we might become. It is an issue that is at the forefront in California of course, & now when I hear about the Texas floods, your constant rain, & our unusually rainy May, it makes me wonder why the changing times. Your unit is certainly timely, but it must be hard to have the students imagine as the rain pounds the windows.
Yup, nothing but rain here on the east coast - but, sadly, drought seems to be with so many other parts of our world these days.
You know what they say... the best laid plans...
Can't help commenting that rainy Seattle has experienced with MANY days of sunshine this spring with less than usual precipitation. A bit of gray returned this week, and I celebrated for my teacher friends. The end of the school year is always easier if the weather is gray, plus sunshine and higher temps make for sweltering classrooms since there is no a/c in our schools (except for the admin pods). They are in school until June 19.
Post a Comment