Dust Bowl Disaster - Lesson Plans

Dust Bowl Disaster
Level X

About the Book

Text Type: Nonfiction/Informational
Page Count: 24
Word Count: 1,937

Book Summary
Dust Bowl Disaster describes the economic and personal hardships endured by farmers in the Great Plains of the United States and Canada during the 1930s. People living in this region went from prosperity to poverty as a relentless drought caused their farms to dry up and dust storms to rage. Period photographs and maps support the text.

About the Lesson

Targeted Reading Strategy

Visualize

Objectives

Use the reading strategy of visualizing to understand text
Understand and identify cause-and-effect relationships
Identify and use prepositional phrases within sentences
Identify similes

Materials

Book -- Dust Bowl Disaster (copy for each student)
Chalkboard or dry erase board
United States map
Visualize, cause and effect, prepositional phrases, similes worksheets

Indicates an opportunity for student to mark in the book. (All activities may be completed with paper and pencil if books are reusable.)

Vocabulary

Content words: conditions, conservation, disasters, drought, dust pneumonia, Dust Bowl, dust storm, economic, erosion, flouted, grasslands, Great Depression, Great Plains, hope, income, irrevocably, migration, precipitation, prosperity, recovery, unemployed

Before Reading

Build Background

Write the word unemployment on the board. Invite students to share what they know about the meaning of this word.
Ask students to identify possible economic and personal hardships that unemployment can create for people.

Preview the Book

Introduce the Book

Give students their copy of the book. Guide them to the front and back covers and read the title. Have students discuss what they see on the covers. Encourage them to offer ideas as to what type of book it is and what it might be about.
Show students the title page. Discuss the information on the page (title, author's name).
Preview the table of contents on page 3. Remind students that the table of contents provides an overview of what the book is about. Ask students what they expect to read about in the book based on what they see in the table of contents. (Accept any answers students can justify.)

Introduce the Reading Strategy: Visualize

Explain to students that good readers often visualize, or create pictures in their mind, while reading. Visualizing is based on the words used in the text and what a person already knows about a topic.
Read pages 4 and 5 aloud to students. Model how to visualize.
Think-aloud: Whenever I read a book, I always pause after a few pages to create a picture in my mind of the information I've read. This helps me organize the important information and understand the ideas in the book. For example, on pages 4 and 5, the author describes how horrible it was living in the United States during the Great Depression. I pictured people arriving at their jobs to find that the business had closed. I pictured people with sad and desperate faces. The people must have scared that they might not be able to pay their bills or buy food for their families.
Reread pages 4 and 5 aloud to students, asking them to use the words in the story to visualize. Introduce and explain the visualize worksheet. Have students draw on the worksheet what they visualized from the text on pages 4 and 5. Invite students to share their drawings.
As students read, encourage them to use other reading strategies in addition to the targeted strategy presented in this section. For tips on additional reading strategies, click here.

Introduce the Comprehension Skill: Cause and effect

Review or explain that a cause is an event that makes something happen, and the effect is what happens because of, or as a result of, the event. Create a two-column chart on the board with the headings Cause and Effect. Write the following sentence on the board under the heading Cause: I hit a baseball through a window.
Model identifying a series of cause-and-effect relationships.
Think-aloud: If I hit a baseball through a window, the window might break and I might have to pay for the window. If I had to pay for the window, I would have to take money out of my savings. If I had to take money out of my savings, I wouldn't have enough money to buy the item I was saving money for. Sometimes a cause and its effect cause other events to happen.
Retell the series of cause-and-effect relationships about the baseball. Ask students to identify the causes and effects. Write each cause and its effect in the chart on the board. When finished, point out how each cause-and-effect relationship leads to other cause-and-effect relationships.

Introduce the Vocabulary

Write the following words from the content vocabulary on the board: drought, grasslands, prosperity, and disasters. Practice reading these words aloud with students.
Direct students to page 8. Ask them to read the first two sentences. Point out the bolded word drought in the first sentence. Discuss how the sentence explains that the Great Plains experienced a time when the fields dried up. Point out that the sentences after it describe that the crops had too little moisture and that the hot summer sun baked the soil. Have students look at the photo on page 8 and discuss the clues they see. Based on these clues, ask students to explain what the word drought means (a long spell without rainfall). Have students follow along as you reread the sentence on the page to confirm the meaning of the word.
Remind students that they should always check whether a word makes sense by rereading the sentence. Remind them that they also may look up the word in the glossary or dictionary if the context clues still do not provide enough information for them to figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Have a volunteer read the definition of drought in the glossary.
Repeat the exercise above with the remaining three vocabulary words.
Show students the photo on page 3. Have groups of students use the vocabulary words on the board to create a story about what might happen in the book. Have each student use one vocabulary word to add on to the story. Repeat the activity after reading the book to check for student understanding of the vocabulary.
For tips on teaching word-attack strategies, click here.

Set the Purpose

Have students read to find out more about the disaster labeled the Dust Bowl. Remind them to stop after every few pages to visualize the most important information and draw on their worksheet what they visualized about it.

During Reading

Student Reading

Guide the reading: Have students read from page 6 to the end of page 11. Encourage those who finish early to go back and reread. Have students draw what they visualized during one or more events of the story on their visualize worksheet.
Model visualizing.
Think-aloud: On page 11, I read about Black Sunday, when the dust bowl conditions couldn't have been worse. I pictured a gigantic wall of dirt and dust rushing across the land as fast as a car on the freeway. I pictured surprised and scared people running as fast as they could, quickly ducking into any shelter they could reach -- sheds, barns, homes, and cars. I pictured the dust swirling around everything, blocking the sun in the sky and creating darkness.
Invite students to share their drawings of what they visualized while reading. Have them explain their drawings aloud.
Create a cause-and-effect chain on the board. Write World War I prevented European farmers from growing wheat under the heading Cause. Ask students to use the text and think-aloud discussion to identify the effect of this cause. (North American farmers sold their wheat to Europe.) Write this information on the chart under the heading Effect.
Introduce and explain the cause and effect worksheet. Ask students to write the information from the board on their worksheet. Have them identify and write on their worksheet a cause-and-effect relationship that happened as a result of preventing European farmers from growing wheat. (Cause: Farmers plowed up more land for wheat to feed Europeans; Effect: When a drought came, the fields dried up and became bare.) Point out how the chain connects the first cause-and-effect relationship with the second (the effect, North American farmers sold their wheat to Europe, is connected to the next cause, Farmers plowed up more land for wheat to feed Europeans).
Check for understanding: Have students read to the end of page 15. Have them visualize the information in the text as they read. Ask students to draw what they visualized on their visualize worksheet. Invite students to share what they visualized.
Have students read the remainder of the book. Encourage them to continue to visualize as they read the rest of the story. Remind them to continue thinking about the important events of the story as they read.

Have students make a question mark in their book beside any word they do not understand or cannot pronounce. Encourage them to use the strategies they have learned to read each word and figure out its meaning.

After Reading

Reflect on the Reading Strategy

Ask students what words, if any, they marked in their book. Use this opportunity to model how they can read these words using decoding strategies and context clues.
Think-aloud: On page 18, I read John Steinbeck's words about the westward migration. I pictured several people packed into cars, carrying all the possessions they owned. I pictured car after car entering new towns, and groups of people entering businesses asking for work.
Ask students to explain how the strategy of visualizing helped them understand and enjoy the story. Lead a discussion about how difficult life must have been for people during this time period in history. Have students study the photos of people on pages 4, 9, 15, and 17. Ask them how they think these people felt.
Independent practice: Have students complete the visualize worksheet. If time allows, have them share their drawings.

Reflect on the Comprehension Skill

Discussion: Discuss with students the information on their cause and effect worksheet. Point out the last effect in their chain. (When a drought came, the fields dried up and became bare.) Have students reread page 17 to identify the cause-and-effect relationship that happened as a result of the fields drying up and becoming bare. (Cause: People had no source of income; Effect: They left the Great Plains to seek work.)
Independent practice: Have students complete the cause and effect worksheet. If time allows, discuss their responses.
Enduring understanding: In this book, you learned about the importance of taking precautions to protect the environment. Now that you know this information, what types of precautions do you think people should be taking now to protect the environment so something like the Dist Bowl doesn't happen again?

Build Skills

Grammar and Mechanics: Prepositional phrases

Write the following sentence on the board: I'll finish my homework after dinner. Point to the word after. Ask students to explain what information this word provides (when homework will be finished).
Explain to students that prepositions are words that show a relationship between things. They provide information about where, when, how, why, and with what something happens.
Explain that a phrase is a short group of words, and that a prepositional phrase is a group of words beginning with a preposition and ending with a noun or pronoun. Write the following list of prepositions on the board or on chart paper: about, above, across, after, along, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, by, during, in, of, on, out, through, under, upon, with, and without. Write these on the board.
Reread the sentence on the board. Point out the prepositional phrase (after dinner).
Write the following sentence from page 4 on the board: It began with the crash of the stock market in 1929. Point to the word with. Have a volunteer explain how the preposition is used in this sentence (it explains how something happened). Ask a student to come to the board to circle the prepositional phrase (with the crash).
Point to the word of in the same sentence. Have a volunteer explain how the preposition is used in this sentence (it explains with what something happened). Ask a student to come to the board to circle the prepositional phrase (of the stock market, in 1929).

Check for understanding: Have students review pages 5 and 6 of the text and circle examples of prepositional phrases. On the board, write the prepositions students identify in the book. Discuss the type of information each prepositional phrase provides (how, when, why, and so on) and how each one links the words in the sentence.

Independent practice: Introduce, explain, and have students complete the prepositional phrases worksheet. If time allows, discuss their answers.

Word Work: Similes

Write the following phrase on the board: The people streamed over the mountains as restless as ants. Have students explain what is being compared in this sentence (the people to ants). Have them identify the signal word (as).
Review or explain that a simile makes a comparison by using the word like or as. Write the words like and as on the board. Tell students that these words are often signals that they are reading a simile.
Have students turn to page 5. Read the first sentence of the second paragraph aloud while students follow along silently. Ask students to identify the simile. Write the following on the board: like money dried up during the stock market crash. Have students tell what is being compared in this sentence (the lack of moisture in the soil to the lack of money after the stock market crash). Have them identify the signal word (like).
Check for understanding: Have students work in pairs to create and write their own similes. Invite them to share their similes aloud.
Independent practice: Introduce, explain, and have students complete the similes worksheet. If time allows, discuss their responses.

Build Fluency

Independent Reading

Allow students to read their book independently. Additionally, partners can take turns reading parts of the book to each other.

Home Connection

Give students their book to take home to read with parents, caregivers, siblings, or friends. Have students practice visualizing the story with someone at home and then comparing the pictures they created in their mind.

Extend the Reading

Persuasive Writing Connection
Have students return to page 18 and reread the Think About It section. Discuss the questions it poses and encourage students to think about and form their own opinions. Have them write their personal responses to the questions.

Social Studies Connection
Supply books and links to Internet websites for students to learn more about the Great Depression and the Dirty Thirties. Discuss the incredible gains that were made after Franklin Roosevelt was elected president (pages 19 through 21) and the insightful changes he made to help the United States emerge from those difficult times.

Assessment

Monitor students to determine if they can:

consistently use the strategy of visualizing to comprehend the text during discussion and on a worksheet
understand and identify cause-and-effect relationships in the text during discussion and on a worksheet
correctly identify and use prepositional phrases during discussion and on a worksheet
accurately identify and use similes during discussion and on a worksheet

Comprehension Checks

Go to "Dust Bowl Disaster" main page