This reading would make a great creative writing prompt. For example, students could write a descriptive passage about a place they know well being reclaimed by nature.

It rained a lot that spring. You woke in the morning
And saw the sky still clouded, the streets still wet,
But nobody noticed so much, except the taxis
And the people who parade. You don’t, in a city.
The parks got very green. All the trees were green
Far into July and August, heavy with leaf,
Heavy with leaf and the long roots boring and spreading,
But nobody noticed that but the city gardeners
And they don’t talk.
                                    Oh, on Sundays, perhaps you’d notice:
Walking through certain blocks, by the shut, proud houses
With the windows boarded, the people gone away,
You’d suddenly see the queerest small shoots of green
Poking through cracks and crevices in the stone
And a bird-sown flower, red on a balcony,
But then you made jokes about grass growing in the streets
And gags and a musical show called “Hot and Wet.”
It made a good box for the papers. When the flamingo
Flew into a meeting of the Board of Estimate,
The new mayor acted at once and called the photographers.
When the first green creeper crawled upon Brooklyn Bridge,
They thought it was ornamental. They let it stay.

That was the year the termites came to New York
And they don’t do well in cold climates—but listen, Joe,
They’re only ants, and ants are nothing but insects.
It was funny and yet rather wistful, in a way
(As Heywood Broun pointed out in the World-Telegram)
To think of them looking for wood in a steel city.
It made you feel about life. It was too divine.
There were funny pictures by all the smart, funny artists
And Macy’s ran a terribly clever ad:
“The Widow’s Termite” or something.
                                                                       There was no
Disturbance. Even the Communists didn’t protest
And say they were Morgan hirelings. It was too hot,
Too hot to protest, too hot to get excited,
An even African heat, lush, fertile and steamy,
That soaked into bone and mind and never once broke.
The warm rain fell in fierce showers and ceased and fell.
Pretty soon you got used to its always being that way.

You got used to the changed rhythm, the altered beat,
To people walking slower, to the whole bright
Fierce pulse of the city slowing, to men in shorts,
To the new sun-helmets from Best’s and the cop’s white uniforms,
And the long noon-rest in the offices, everywhere.
It wasn’t a plan or anything. It just happened.
The fingers tapped slower, the office-boys
Dozed on their benches, the bookkeeper yawned at his desk.
The A. T. & T. was the first to change the shifts
And establish an official siesta-room;
But they were always efficient. Mostly it just
Happened like sleep itself, like a tropic sleep,
Till even the Thirties were deserted at noon
Except for a few tourists and one damp cop.
They ran boats to see the big lilies on the North River
But it was only the tourists who really noticed
The flocks of rose-and-green parrots and parakeets
Nesting in the stone crannies of the Cathedral.
The rest of us had forgotten when they first came.

There wasn’t any real change, it was just a heat spell,
A rain spell, a funny summer, a weather-man’s joke,
In spite of the geraniums three feet high
In the tin-can gardens of Hester and Desbrosses.
New York was New York. It couldn’t turn inside out.
When they got the news from Woods Hole about the Gulf Stream,
The Times ran a adequate story.
But nobody reads those stories but science-cranks.

Until, one day, a somnolent city-editor
Gave a new cub the termite yarn to break his teeth on.
The cub was just down from Vermont, so he took his time.
He was serious about it. He went around.
He read all about termites in the Public Library
And it made him sore when they fired him.
                                                                               So, one evening,
Talking with an old watchman, beside the first
Raw girders of the new Planetopolis Building
(Ten thousand brine-cooled offices, each with shower)
He saw a dark line creeping across the rubble
And turned a flashlight on it.
                                                      “Say, buddy,” he said,
“You’d better look out for those ants. They eat wood, you know,
They’ll have your shack down in no time.”
                                                                             The watchman spat.
“Oh, they’ve quit eating wood,” he said, in a casual voice,
“I thought everybody knew that.”
                                                            —and, reaching down,
He pried from the insect jaws the bright crumb of steel.

You need to be a subscriber (or belong to a library that subscribes electronically) in order to read the full articles. If you have access, though, it’s worth checking out.

May 10 : FROG SONGS: Poetry and Essays, Field Ecology and Entomology – “Learn to use haiku to teach entomology. Learn to use poetry to help students write clearer more exciting essays. This simple set of lesson plans can be used by classroom teachers or informal educators to get students outdoors on a warm spring day to explore the relationships between insects and biodiversity.”

May 16 : Water Stewardship – From Source to Sea – “This presentation will identify elements of water literacy through a stewardship study with grades 4/5 school students. While drawing from a specific school project, it will identify elements that can be transferred to other situations – and higher grade levels. The project involved field learning immersed in local community, making personal connections that lead to community activism.”

May 19 : Do a Little or Do a Lot: Sustainability Education – “After attending this webinar, participants will leave with an understanding of what education for sustainability is and how they can incorporate sustainability into their teaching practices. You/they will learn about free curriculum resources that examine interconnections between economy, environment, and society.”

May 25 : Green Craft-Making – “The why and how of focusing one’s eco-art activities on using natural materials easily found in the outdoors.”

Personally, I feel like this would be a great addition to a global issues-themed class, as our attitude is fundamental to how we respond to the world. I’m very interested in creating some happiness materials myself, and I’d like to offer it as a content elective in the future. I suspect that administrative responsibilities may keep me out of the classroom until next spring, though, so we’ll see.

In the meantime, I’m starting to collect happiness resources. For starters, there was a recent issue of Yes Magazine devoted to sustainable happiness. There are lots of articles, along with some visual aids.

There’s also a great list from Larry Ferlazzo that includes a bunch of infographics, along with articles like this one in The Atlantic on happiness and money.

If you know of any happiness materials, please feel free to share them in the comments. I’ll do likewise, as I find them.

Clean Up Your Mess is a very accessible website on the basics of visual design. As you might expect, everything is presented quite clearly, and terms are explained (and illustrated) very well. I really like the overall thrust, which is in favor of cleanliness and organization. I will absolutely point students towards this website the next time I require some sort of visual component to a project.

Thanks Larry

It’s simple to use. Just copy and paste some text into the box, and it will highlight a number of potential problems. For each, you are presented samples of the word / phrase used in context (from a seemingly random website) along with a pie chart breaking down the relative frequency of each alternative. I used a sample of student writing, and found the suggestions to be mostly accurate.

I wouldn’t just give it to students as a failsafe tool, though. Instead, I’d like to go through an example of their writing as a class, to look at how some of the suggestions are misleading.

For example, the sample of writing I used contained the phrase “put on Internet”. While ESL Assistant highlighted this phrase, it also “recommended” it, in the sense that “put on Internet” was favored 51% to 49% over “put on the Internet”. In the examples, though, it’s clear that Internet is used as an adjective in the former, while it is a noun in the latter, and my student meant it as a noun. Reminding students to look at the part of speech of the examples could help them get even more out of this tool.

Another example was the phrase “try make a lot” for which ESL Assistant had a 99% recommendation for “try a lot”, as opposed to “try to make a lot”, which wasn’t suggested at all. Still, I think this is a neat resource for students. And, surprisingly, “trying make” and “trying to make” were split evenly, with millions of examples on each side. Yikes. This tool would definitely be improved if they restricted the sites it pulled examples from.

Thanks Larry

This new research-based teacher’s guide helps students develop English language skills through highly engaging real-world investigations of current global issues. Designed for intermediate-level English language learners and striving readers, Making Connections combines language learning with opportunities for students to think critically about sustainable solutions for community development, environmental issues, quality of life, and more. Aligned with education standards, this 352-page guide includes nine chapters with lessons that have been reviewed and field tested by content experts, teachers, and students. Throughout the teacher’s guide, ideas for differentiated instruction make this text applicable for student levels ranging from beginner to advanced.

The table of contents, chapter 1, and chapter 3 are available to download if you’re interested in checking it out.

Facing the Future has a collection of activity-based, global issues lesson plans for students of all ages. In addition to the great stuff they offer for sale, they have a ton of materials available as free downloads. I especially like the lesson plans from Engaging Students Through Global Issues, and the Climate Change curricula. Finally, don’t miss their collection of graphs and other graphics. They cover a range of issues and could readily be used for discussion activities.

The International School Studies Association at the University of Denver has a large collection of links to lesson plans that deal with global issues. They break them down thematically (Cultural Studies, Environmental Studies, Economics, etc.) and by grade level.

My collection of links to global issues-themed video games might also work well with K-12 students.

Larry Ferlazzo’s blog has a ton of K-12 materials, and his “Best of” series includes ideas for teaching about social justice issues, environmental issues, Darfur, the recession, and many other issues.

For America-centric lesson plans, the Library of Congress and National Archives both have collections of lesson plans on race, war, gender and other topics. One great thing about these sites is the inclusion of primary sources — documents and images from history that can convey these issues more powerfully to students. The National Archives site also has a series of worksheets to use for analyzing documents, pictures, maps and so on.

Finally, I invite you to look at lesson plans from the Patel Center’s Global Schools Project. These lessons are not made specifically for ESL students, but they could certainly be adapted for them. I am currently working on a Patel Center program for teachers from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and my students will be adding their lesson plans to this resource.

Please feel free to share other good K-12 resources in the comments!

The two poems I used as examples were “God to a Hungry Child” and “Two Young Women”. “God to a Hungry Child” is written from the point of view of God, addressing a hungry child. Thus, in the writing portion of the activity, I ask students to write something from the perspective of God explaining something to someone. “Two Young Women” has a similarly imitatable (albeit totally different) structure to it.

Here is the handout I used, which explains the activity and includes the two poems.

This is a retooling of an older activity that I used as part of a series of green-themed activities at another language school.