When plans go wrong: words from a story chapter
Plans do not always work the first time. In a story about a plan that goes wrong, look for four things: the plan, the problem, the feeling and what the characters do next. Learn the key words with the help of examples. Initiative: Mina tidied the shelf without being asked; she took the initiative. A donation is a gift that helps: a family gave fifty books to the library as a donation. To quit is to stop before the end: he did not quit the race, even when he was tired. Climate is the usual weather of a place over many years, while weather is what it is like today. Disappointed means sad because something was not as good as you hoped, and determination is the strong decision to keep trying. Your book has Chapter Three of a serial story on pages 48–49: read it after this lesson and find out how its characters deal with problems, using these words. Here we practise with our own text.
| Step | Question | In our text |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | What do they want to make? | A small weather station. |
| Problem | What goes wrong? | The wind blew the model over. |
| Feeling | How do they feel? | Disappointed; nobody spoke. |
| Next step | What do they do? | Find out why, and rebuild it better. |
Four students in the science club decided to build a small weather station to record the climate of their town: the temperature and the wind. Hagar took the initiative and wrote the first plan on the board without waiting for the teacher. The first model was ready after two weeks, but on the test day the wind blew it over, and the numbers were not saved. The team was disappointed, and for an hour nobody spoke. Then Hagar said, “Let us find out why it fell.” They discovered that the legs were too short, so they made them longer and added heavy stones. The second test worked, and the station recorded the temperature every hour for a month. The team learned that determination means trying again with a better plan.
Problem story map. Draw four boxes: Plan, Problem, Feeling, Next step. Fill them for a time when something you tried did not work the first time (a model, a game, a drawing). Tell it to a grown-up in five sentences and say which word from the lesson describes you: initiative, disappointed or determination.