As the fires in Los Angeles continue to burn, our students are confronted once again by the sad realities of climate change. Whether they’re directly affected by the blaze, the smoke, or just the constant coverage on their social media feeds, it would be natural for them to feel hopeless and powerless in the face of a terrible event like this.
Enter Amanda Gorman, former youth poet laureate and champion for young people. While she never shies away from the hard truths confronting America, she always leaves space for hope. Her new poem, “Smoldering Dawn,” about the fires that have threatened her own home and ravaged her hometown, is no different.
It’s an ideal text to share with students, creating an opportunity for an interdisciplinary exploration of what’s happening right now in L.A. And we’ve got an accompanying lesson plan that will help your students process this tragedy.
Let’s take a peek at the lesson
This download provides a step-by-step activity to guide students in watching and interpreting Gorman’s poem. They’ll contextualize it with an examination of the climate conditions that led to the situation in California, and produce a one-pager interpreting Gorman’s art through the lens of science, all with a dash of hope mixed in.
Getting started
Before you dig into the texts for the project, introduce the idea of the one-pager. If you’ve never done a one-pager before, take a few minutes to explain the concept and show some examples to your class. Let students know they’ll be interpreting Amanda Gorman’s poem in the context of the climate situation in California, which you’ll be reading about shortly.
Next, share Gorman’s poem with your students. You can find it on Instagram.
After your class has listened to the poem, take a few minutes to explore the climate conditions that helped cause the wildfires.
These are some possible sources, though you could find many more if these don’t feel like the right fit for your students.
Next steps
Now that your students have the background information they need to start their one-pager, share the model included with the free curriculum set, or a model of your own, to give them a sense for the project.
Project (or hand out) your requirements for the one-pager. Here are some possibilities:
- Use the border to explore and explain the conditions that led to this wildfire.
- Choose at least one image from Gorman’s poem to represent as well as at least two images that show your understanding of the area and the people affected by the fires.
- Make intentional color choices that reinforce the mood and emotions you would like your one-pager to convey.
- Include at least three quotations from the poem in and around your imagery.
- Amanda Gorman makes space for hope in her poem. If you wish, make space for hope in your one-pager through additional imagery and/or your own thoughts on climate change.
Giving students a template as a starting point for a one-pager can be a big help, since it can help relieve any feelings of creative overwhelm when they’re staring at a blank page.
There are several options included in this set, or you can create templates of your own. Students who are already comfortable with one-pagers, or who shine with artistic projects, may prefer to skip the template and start from a clean sheet of paper. That’s fine too!
Another path to success you can consider is letting students who wish to work digitally on their one-pagers, either on slides or in a design program like Canva.
As your students work, circulate to answer any questions that come up. If you see a student struggling, you might invite someone nearby who is finding their way to show what they are doing as an additional model in process.
Wrapping it all up
When your students have finished, wrap up with a gallery walk so everyone can see how others have represented Gorman’s work in combination with the climate context.
If you’d like to extend this one-day activity, you could move into a research project on climate change or an exploration of Amanda Gorman’s poetry. Otherwise, it stands well on its own as a one-day lesson.
Download this awesome lesson now!
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