In these three diary entries, a national park ranger in the USA is sharing about his work at different times of a year.
Language Forms & Functions:Vocabulary
- Words and expressions about working in a national park, e.g., park ranger, prairie, lawn mower, ski trail, campground, etc
Language Items
- Use different past tenses to refer to events in the past, e.g., While I was seed picking with the fourth graders, Ben raked leaves in the picnic areas.
- Use the reported speech to report what someone has said and refer to events in the past, present and future, e.g., They said they were at a party all night and decided to go camping after the party ended.
Language Skills:Reading
- Recognise the format and language features of a variety of text types, e.g., diaries
- Skim a text to obtain a general impression and the gist or main ideas
- Employ contextual and syntactic clues to deduce meaning of unknown words
Writing
- Produce written texts appropriate to context, purpose and audience
- Use appropriate formats, conventions and language features when writing a variety of text-types, e.g., diaries
User Tips: - As the diary entries are quite long which may be demanding to students, teachers could ask students to read one or two of the entries and skim for the gist only.
- Ask students to focus on the features and language used in the entries, such as date, past tenses, personal pronouns, past tenses, etc.
- To help students understand more about the work of the park ranger, teachers could show them some pictures and other relevant information about the national park by clicking on the link "Wisconsin's State Parks" provided at the bottom of the diary entry.
