2 The Woods Were Tossing with Jewels.docx

1、2 The Woods Were Tossing with JewelsLesson Two The Woods Were Tossing with Jewels Marie St. John ObjectivesStudents will be able to:1. understand the multifold impacts of the westward movement in expanding the territory, shaping the American national character and the American life style, as well as

2、 the American literature； 2. grasp the essence of individualism and traditional values as embodied in the daily life of those frontiersmen (such as independence/self-reliance, courage, freedom, hard work, simple life, love of nature and love of family, etc.);3. appreciate the easy style, simple yet

3、vivid language;4. compare individualism and traditional American values with collectivism and traditional Chinese values; 5. master the key language points and typical writing techniques employed in a narrative such as building up tension, creating suspense, smooth transition, planning the plots, et

4、c.;6. conduct a series of reading, listening, speaking and writing activities related to the theme of the unit. Time allotment: The teaching plan is to be carried out with 6 teaching hours.Introduction: Do you like going to the theatre? Or do you like watch Movie Channel on TV? Then what kinds of mo

5、vies do you like best, romance like Romeo and Juliet, war like the Last Drop of Blood, or horror like the Silent Lamb? Are you familiar with movies on American frontier life or on cowboys? Movies starred say, by Clint Eastwood. I am sure you have seen one or two such movies. Then can you give me a g

6、eneral description of the hero in such movies? What kind of clothes they typically wear? - do they wear clean suit? No. they wear jeans and worn-out jeans, dirty and stained. What about their shoes, do they wear polished leather shoes? No. they wear leather boots (for what purpose, for riding a hors

7、e) . What kind of hat do they have? Top hat (大礼帽) or casual wide-brimmed hat ( to protect their eyes from strong sunlight). Do they smoke cigar? No, they chew tobacco and spit tobacco juice anywhere they like. How do they travel, on foot? Right, they are always found on horse back. Do they carry can

8、e with them? No, they carry gun instead to protect themselves and to punish those bad men. All right, what about their appearance, characters or personality? Do they look gentle? No. they look rough and masculine, though inevitably handsome. They curse all the time. They have no manners to others. T

9、hey are experts at fighting and shooting. They come and go like a free wind, never stay for anyone, even his beloved woman. They are strong minded, self-reliant, capable of survival in harsh environment. They are warm-hearted to the weak and determined to seek justice with their rifles. In one word,

10、 they are just like what a real man should be. Of course, they are only fictional figures. Their exciting, romantic and legendary life is created by writers and movie directors. However, they are true to some extent. They share something in common with those frontier people in American history. For

11、instance, their self-reliance, their strong ability of survival under hard conditions, their courage, ambition and strong will, their skills in riding and shooting are also essential to frontier men. To most people, including many Americans, cowboys are the symbol of American frontier men. Their lif

12、e represents the unique American life style in its early days. However, it is necessary to know that cowboy life was only a small part of American frontier life and the life in frontier was far from romantic, though far important in American history. The word frontier is closely linked with the West

13、ward Movement of Americans from 1600s to 1900s. During a period as long as 300 years, immigrants came continuously from the old continent to the unexplored new land and pushed its frontier steadily from the eastern coast further into the continent till the Pacific Ocean in the west, Alaska in the no

14、rth and Mexican gulf in the south. The process of westward movement is the process of the formation of the nation and the country. In other words, the westward movement is important in that it not only helped to expand territory, but to shape those immigrants into an integrated nation with its disti

15、nctive national character, known as the American spirit. As a historian said “The frontier did much to shape American life”.In this lesson, we are to have a glimpse of the frontier life, not from a dramatized movie, but from a recollected memory. Detailed study of the textPara.11. in the first parag

16、raph, the author provides us with some background information: the story was set at the end of the 19th century in Florid ( at that time, the U.S. was still a predominantly agricultural country; the westward movement came to end and the frontier was disappearing, but the offshore islands in Florida

17、were largely unexplored); the narrator was a five-year-old girl then and the story is told from a childs point of view; What did the father decide to do? - He decided to take his family through the wilds of the Everglades and staked a claim on an offshore islandWhat was his purpose? - He wanted to f

18、arm the island but more importantly, to give the kids a taste of the way he grew up.2. In 1899 when I was five years old and living in Palmetto, Florida, my father decided to take his family through the wilds of the Everglades and stake a claim on an offshore island. palmetto: a type of plant, see n

19、ote 1. The place is perhaps named after the palmettos, which are native to the area and grow abundant there. Wild: (usu.pl) an inhabited or uncultivated region. Everglades: see note 2, vast marsh covering much of southern Florida. A national park was established here in 1947. Stake a claim: to say o

20、r show clearly that you consider something is or should be yours.In 1862, American government issued Homestead Act. According to the act, government land could be claimed by merely occupying and improving it. In other words, anybody can claim a piece of virgin land as his as long as he inhabited on

21、and cultivated it.3. What do we know about the father form the first paragraph? he grew up in a rural environment (he had been a cowboy in the Myakka area when he was fifteen years old) and his childhood experience helped form his simple and natural lifestyle (as long as he lived, papa liked his cor

22、n bread made campfire style with boiling water and salt only, and flattened out into a brittle, tasty cracker.)Para.24. What is the topic sentence of para.2? The topic sentence is “his life was a series of adventures.” Then the author supports this statement with a sketch of what happened to her fat

23、hers family in the Civil War an dhow his father managed to finish school and find a job.5. His fathers carriage house in Charleston, South Carolina, and his nearby plantation were in the line of Shermans march carriage house: a small building, usually part of an estate or adjacent to the main house

24、which houses carriages, coaches or other vehicles, also “coach house” Charleston: an important city in the South. (See Note 3.) The firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston in 1861 touched off the American Civil War. 6. When Papa finished school at the academy there, he worked as a cowboy on a ranch in M

25、yakka for a friend of his dead fathers. academy: in this case a private secondary school. Usually it refers to an institution for higher learning and scientific researches, such as the Academy of Science ranch: a large farm, especially in the west U.S., with its building, lands, etc, for the raising

26、 of cattle, horses, or sheep in great numbers. Note to differ it from plantation, which is a large farm in the south U.S. for planting crops such as wheat, cotton, corn etc.7. By age thirty, he was a county sheriff, no mean job in those days, and his territory was wide ranging. The county he served

27、was later split into six or eight counties. This is to show that the fathers decision to leave for the wilds of Florida was out of his adventurous character rather than financial difficulties. The job of a county sheriff was important and the area under my fathers jurisdiction was far and widePara.3

28、 8. South Florida was uninviting to many because of the mosquitoes, panthers, crocodiles, swamps, and wetlands. But these marks of wild country called to my father like the legendary siren song. To some people, South Florida, with its wild animals, backwardness and poor living conditions, wasnt a pl

29、easant place to live in, but my father was deeply attracted to it precisely because it was unexplored. The uncultivated natural state poses a tempting challenge to my father.Para.49. What the main idea of this paragraph? The author describes what their life was like in Palmetto. It was a beautiful p

30、lace and their life was simple but comfortable, natural and safe; yet the father was adventurous and enterprising and insisted on setting out for the untouched land of the Ten Thousand Islands. After detailed descriptions of the house, the surroundings and their relatives, the author sums up this pa

31、rt with a sentence, “it was an idyllic life, and we lived close to our family and to the comforts and safe a small town could afford.”10. He started building a covered wagon around the fourth of July and we went into the wilderness with him in the fall. In those days in the rural area and to a littl

32、e girl, time might not be as important a concept as it is today, besides, as a little girl, it is only natural for her to remember vaguely when they started their journey. Then why did she remember the fourth of July? Whats special about this date? - it is the independence day, an important national holiday of the United States. For kids, holidays are always something to be remembered.11. We had made our home in Palmetto for a year or so where my mothers gentle folks, the Harrisons, had settled following the Civil War. gentle folks: (old usage) people of