| Body | By Stephanie Knight, Kathryn Carpenter, and Ben Pearson
The purpose of this activity is to engage intermediate learners in elementary schools in cross-curricular learning. In the activity, learners engage in language creation to summarize events that have already happened. In order to meet this objective, learners will learn, appropriate, and produce vocabulary associated with animals and their habitats.
Objectives
Learners will be able to:
- Understand and produce vocabulary associated with animals and their habitats
- Compose a narrative about the major events that happened in a story
- Summarize events with an appropriate amount of supporting details
- Format and write a news article
Modes: Interpretive Reading, Presentational Writing
Resources: Intermediate Activity 2 Learner Planning and Composition Sheet, wildlife article in the target language, Safari Tales app
Procedure
- Give learners tips on how to discern unknown vocabulary. These tips include identifying cognates, looking for linguistic patterns, and using context to predict the possible meaning of unknown words. You may need to provide direct instruction regarding linguistic patterns at this time.
- Allow the learners to play Safari Tales for roughly twenty minutes. As they play and read the final digital storybook created by gameplay (if they don’t finish the assigned quest, they can access the associated storybook by hitting the home icon in the top left corner), they should generate their own vocabulary list using the tips provided to them in Step 1.They should document this list on their own sheets of paper.
- After generating these lists, learners will share what they have come up with in groups of four. These groups should clarify any uncertainties regarding the interpretation of new words.
- Learners will reread the story that they created and take notes regarding three to five major events on the Intermediate Activity 2 Learner Planning and Composition Sheet.
- Next, provide learners with a short article in the target language written by a wildlife reporter. Great examples can be found at https://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines.aspx. Project the article so that the class may read it together. Mark the text to highlight the formatting requirements of a news article for learners. Make sure to also mark the events and supporting details within the article in order to help learners understand how to include appropriate amounts and types of details in their writing. To wrap up this step of the activity, discuss the register employed by the example article and any other considerations that the learners should take into account when they write their own texts.
- Finally, learners will write a news article on the Intermediate Activity 2 Learner Planning and Composition Sheet. This article will be inspired by the storybook that learners created during gameplay. In this news article, learners will summarize the major events that occurred in the storybook and provide appropriate types and quantities of supporting details. While learners should draw inspiration from the story, the language that they create should be their own. Allow them to add details and color as they see fit.
Notes:
Safari Tales is available in English and in Spanish.
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