How do people and the environment affect each other? This is the question we set out to answer on Wednesday, September 8th. We were introduced to the project on the first day back to school and we began with the normal things we start with. We got into our table groups and created need to knows about the project. We were told that this project had been organized by a website called CommonLit. People around the country were going to be doing a similar project. We were going to be doing a modified version of the project. This version would be very similar just with minor adjustments to fit our class better. In this project, we were going to write a letter to someone to influence change in our environment. The first thing we did is wrote a multi paragraph that was our opinion on wether humans were protectors or destroyers of the environment. This is mine.
The next thing we did is we came up with an idea of what we wanted our letter to be about. Some of the main topics were plastic pollution, marine life health, better uses of energy, and wildfires, which is what I did for my letter. More specifically, I did bad air quality caused by wildfires. We then got our topics approved and started our first CommonLit activity. The CommonLit activities were stories that we were told to read and then answer questions to show our understanding of the story. The first one we did was called Lee Sherman and the Toxic Louisiana Bayou. This was a story about a person who dumped chemicals into a bayou, under instruction from the company he worked for. He then told everyone he did it after the chemicals started threatening fisherman’s livelihoods. This story is about companies greed and willingness to do whatever to make more money, even if it destroys the environment. We also learned and were quizzed on a set of vocabulary words.
As we developed our letters, we did more CommonLit activities, such as ‘He-y come on ou-t!’. This was a story about a city that found a seemingly bottomless hole, and started dumping all of their waste in to the hole. When the first found the hole they threw a pebble down the hole and shouted down it, ‘He-y come on ou-t’. At the end of the story, a pebble fell from the sky and landed next to a construction worker who was building something near the hole. Then a mysterious voice shouted from above, ‘He-y come on ou-t’. This basically is telling us that our actions will come back to haunt us. Now, back to the letter. I started out with very little ideas for my letter, so our first milestone was very helpful to me. This milestone was a conference between the teacher and the student where we asked questions and got advice for our letter. We had to fill out a sheet of our plan for our letter as well as some evidence to support our claims. This was mine.
The part of the letter that I was struggling with the most was finding a solution to my problem. The solution we settled on at the conference was controlled burns. Controlled burns are a tactic used by firefighters to protect places and things from fires. They burn out all of the fuel(trees and other things that the fire could spread too) and that leaves the fire with no place to go. Controlled burns are a useful tactic to protect things from wildfires once they’ve started. Our idea was to isolate patches of forest before the fires started so that the fire couldn’t spread very far. This helped me a lot because I now had an idea of where to start. The letter draft that I came up with after the conference is here.
The next thing we did was an interview with Dennis Thomas and Megan Curren, two environmentalists and city councillors in the Greater Vancouver area. Here is a sheet filled out during the interview.
We also did another CommonLit project. This one was about a family who stayed in a town that was being flooded by the rising sea levels. We also updated our letter. Here is draft number 2.
The next thing we did is another CommonLit activity. This one was called The Sea Also Rises. This was a true story about the rising sea levels along the eastern coast of the U.S. This is also the story that I will be doing my CommonLit connection on. More on that later. We also revised our letter once again. Here is draft number 3.
We then got our scores for all of the common lit activities that we did. Here are mine.
We also revised our letters more. Here is draft number 4.(Hey that rhymed!)
The next thing we did was the CommonLit connections. This was an in-class multi-paragraph one hour write where we connected the themes in our letter to the themes in a CommonLit story. I chose to connect my letter to The Sea Also Rises. Here is mine.
The next few days were spent revising our letters and honing them to perfection. Here is my final letter.
I think this was a great project to start off our school year. It was introduced to us in a way that did not shock our summer brains too much. I think that I completed this projects curricular competency pretty well. This competency was ‘Use strategies to analyze text, recognize the role of context and perspectives in text, recognize how texts use literary devices to enhance meaning’. I think that I did this pretty well, between my CommonLit connection, all of the CommonLit activities, and my letter. I think that overall, this project sufficiently answered the question, ‘How do people and the environment affect each other?’
Leave a Reply