Unit 4 Natural Disasters—Reading & Thinking

 

【教学目标与核心素养】

1. Teach students to find out the paragraph topic sentences, understand the basic information of the Tangshan earthquake through skimming, searching and other reading skills.

2. Enable students to sort out the details of the paragraph, to understand the strange things before the Tangshan earthquake, the tremendous destructive force caused by the earthquake, and the rapid and selfless rescue and reconstruction after the disaster.

3. Discuss the thinking brought by earthquake and sublimate the theme significance.

【教学重难点】

1. Develop students’ reading ability such as skimming, scanning and summarizing.

2. Let students talk about the precursor before the earthquake, the damage caused by the earthquake, the rescue after the earthquake and the reconstruction after the earthquake.

【教学过程】

Step 1 Activity 1 Activating background information

T: Today we are going to learn a passage with the title “The Night the Earth Didn’t Sleep”. So why didn’t the earth sleep on that night? What happened to the earth? Actually there is a movie directed by Feng Xiaogang focuses on the same earthquake. Now, I’d like to show you a short clip of the movie.

1. Talk about the earthquake

Q1. What do you learn from the video?

2. Talk about Tangshan earthquake.

Q1. What do you know about Tangshan earthquake?

Q2. What do you want to know about it?

Step 2 Activity 2 Reading to get some basic information about earthquake

1. Read quickly to find the answers to the students’ own questions.

2. Read for the topic sentences and work out the organization of the text.

Q1 What’s the topic sentence in each paragraph?

Q2 In what order does the author describe the earthquake?

Step 3 Activity 3 Reading for detailed information

1. Read to get detailed information about Paragraph 1.

Q1: What were the strange things?

Q2: What was people’s reaction to these strange things?

Q3. Why didn’t people pay attention to these strange things/the signs before the earthquake?

T: People had little knowledge of earthquake at that time.

Q4 When does this paragraph mainly talk about?

T: Abnormal signs before the earthquake.

2. Read to get detailed information about Paragraph 2.

Q1 How strong was the earthquake?

Q2 How did the people feel when the earthquake happened?

Q3 What does this paragraph mainly talk about?

3. Read to get detailed information about Para. 3.

Q1 What were destroyed?

Q2 How does the writer describe “everything in the city”?

Q3 How did the people feel?

Q4 What does this paragraph mainly talk about?

4. Read to get detailed information about Paragraph 4.

Q1. Who brought hope back? And what did they do?

Q2. How did the people feel after a lot of people came to rescue?

Q3. How was the city after a lot of people came to rescue?

5. Read to get detailed information about Paragraph 5.

Q1. What shows the revival of Tangshan?

Q2. How can Tangshan revive itself and get up on its feet again?

Q3. In times of disasters, how can we go through it?

T: In times of disasters, we should unify, show the wisdom and stay positive.

Step 4 Activity 4 Highlighting the theme and reflecting

1. Make a summary of the text.

time	what happened	people’s response
before
during
after

2. Further understand the title

Q: After our learning, why do you think the earth didn’t sleep on that night?

T: An earthquake happened. The people in the earthquake suffered a lot, and the people outside Tangshan were concerned about the people there a lot.

3. Reflect through discussion on what can be learnt after reading.

T: Disasters are powerful. Unpreparedness can be deadly. Life is weak, but if people work together to help each other, disasters can be defeated.

There is no love from disaster, but we have love in the human heart.

Step 5 Assignment

How does the writer convey that the earthquake was deadly, and that people were helpless during the earthquake? Try to find some attractive and impressive expressions and note them down.