CALLAPreparation Phase

Per The Calla Handbook, the preparation phase for a language unit “…calls for the elicitation and illumination of students’ prior knowledge about the theme of the…” unit. Students may work collaboratively (think, pair, share). The teacher “…can provide context and help develop background knowledge through visuals, realia, audiotapes, videos, and dramatic reading. Recalling prior knowledge is an important component of both reading and writing. The teacher may preview some essential vocabulary, but leave some unfamiliar vocabulary for students to encounter in context when they read the text.” page 300, 1994 edition

10th Grade/Level 3

Content Objectives: Students will be able to create their own

narratives describing an earthquake experience, using prior knowledge and

(auditory & visually) previewing a text.

KnowledgeThe scientific reasons for an earthquake; geographical

locations and effects on property.

Processes/Skills Listening to a spoken narrative

State/TESOL/FL Standards Goal 2, Standard 2

To use English to achieve academically in all content areas. Students will use English to

obtain, process, construct and provide subject matter information in a spoken and written form.

Language Objectives Use modifiers and descriptive language to create setting and tone.

Language AwarenessUsing modifiers and descriptive language create visual images of

writing, allowing readers to connect with the text.

Language UseSs. will demonstrate their knowledge of "wh" questions by creating a

radio spot.  

TESOL/State Standards Goal 3, Standard 1

To use English in socially and culturally appropriate ways; Students will choose language variety, register and genre according to audience,

purpose and setting.

Learning Strategies Objectives

Metacognitive Awareness

Evaluation/Self-Assessment

Strategies to Learn/Practice Use

Ss. will use correct conventions in order to ask and respond to "wh" questions.

TESOL/State Standards

Goal 2, Standard 3

To use English to achieve academically in all content areas; Students will use appropriate learning strategies to construct and apply academic knowledge.

Materials

• Computer with LCD

• Pre-recorded audiotape

• Visuals from Lesson 2

• Copies of The Earth Dragon Awakes

• Teacher’s notes, checklist, rubric

Vocabulary• tenement _______________________________________• room __________________________________________• floor___________________________________________• furniture________________________________________• belongings______________________________________• walls___________________________________________• windows________________________________________• ceiling__________________________________________

Don’t be shaken by these new words!Use a dictionary when the context does not help!

On the Radio!

You are going to write and record a radio spot about the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

Imagine you are a reporter on the scene. What sounds do you hear?

What smells can you recognize?What do you see?

Use the academic vocabulary you have learned in this lesson and describe the scene for the listening audience. You must use adjectives (descriptive words) in order to help the listeners “see” what you see.

Radio Spot Vocabulary

• Treasures

• Walls

• Flames

• Decaying

• Homeless

These are his belongings.

PICTURE OF THE GREAT CATASTROPHE

San Francisco, the beautiful "City of the Golden West," the "Paradise of the Pacific," is no more. This was this message wafted around the remnants of what was one of the most beautiful, most picturesque, most generous of cities.

I, like all the rest of my stricken brethren, stood and watched the home, which contained treasures that neither time nor money can ever replace–the home dearest of any spot on earth, around whose walls clustered memories of blissful by-gone days,–yes, I stood on the loft eminence overlooking the tranquil water of the mighty Pacific, and watched and watched, and watched, and waited, and watched–until I saw my home, which had been a part of my very life, within a few feet of the hungry, angry flames–and then, oh then! My poor heart throbbed wildly with pain, and the repressed tears fell and I, with my loved ones wept as we had never done before. Frail, human intellect cannot comprehend the awful anguish endured by the stricken ones of San Francisco since Wednesday morning, April Eighteenth. Hunger and cold were as naught compared with the thought that one was forced to stand idly by and witness the destruction of our beautiful homes, our precious belongings. Never while memory lasts can I forget the distressing heartrending scenes in the doomed city. Space will not permit enumeration, suffice it to say, that through it all the people acted nobly and well. All honor to these heroes, fathers, sons, husbands and brothers, who guarded the tottering footsteps of their loved ones, encouraging them onward to places of safety, while on the verge of collapse and starvation themselves.

With my folks and a few belongings we could save, we left our home on Broadway and Mason on Thursday morning, April Eighteenth, and trudged over hills and rocks until we reached an apparently safe spot. There with but food or covering we camped for the night. Oh! the terrors of the night! All around us was one roaring, crackling furnace of flames. The people watched and waited, until warned by the soldiers of certain death should they remain, moved onward, where they knew not.

It was two o'clock! Still the flames raged, still we wended our weary way, until we reached Fort Mason and there we camped beside twenty-five decaying bodies. Oh, it was terrible, terrible! No food, no water, nothing! Still the fierce flames leaped toward us, each new report that reached us was more dreadful than the preceding, till, at last, ill from hunger, exposure and the odor from the dead bodies, and as a last desperate means of delivery from an awful fate, we decided to tramp to Golden Gate Park–oh, thanks to our merciful God, relief came.

An acquaintance whom we had not seen for years came and asked us if we wished to board his sand scow, which was bound for Vallejo. We could scarcely believe it–anything, anywhere, as long as we could escape from the terrifying scenes around us. Nothing was ever more welcome–but for Captain Murphy's forethought and generosity, I with my loved ones would be lying dead at Fort Mason.

For two nights we slept on sand, planks and rocks, with no covering save the blue studded heavens, but we thanked God with all the fervor and from the very depths of our souls.

Sunday morning we attended mass at Vallejo's Catholic church, and prayed for our poor friends in the domed city, and thanked God for His mercy to us.

After a light breakfast on board the scow, we knew not where to go–when my brother, who had been searching for his fellow Knights of Columbus, returned and informed us that a home awaited us in Vallejo. These noble, generous, brave hearted Knights of Columbus came to our aid, and to them do we owe our present safety. They have provided everything for us and for our comfort. How can we, homeless wanderers, ever repay them? Oh, who can realize the anguish, the sorrow that is ours? We have never been in a position to give and to give freely, but now-but God has been with us. He will not desert us now.

To Mr. Lynch, Mr. Folmer, Mr. Cunningham and family and Mr. Jones, together with all the Knights of Columbus whose names are unknown, to Captain Murphy, of the "Two Brothers" scow, to you all, noble hearted men, do we owe a debt of gratitude, which with God's help we shall son be able to repay.

The past our tears cannot undo, but the future is ours, and as old Father time carries us farther down the stream of life, we shall never forget the men who came so nobly to our rescue.

We have naught to offer now but our thankful hearts and fond prayers. May every kindness you have shown us, oh, Knights of Columbus, be showered a hundred fold on you and yours, and may your deeds of charity be sparkling jewels added to that crown of eternal life, which our God has promised His faithful followers.

Rose M. Quinn. Vallejo Daily TimesApril 27, 1906

THE WISDOM OF THE DOGSBRUTE four-footed instinct triumphed over objective two-footed reason in that first

moment of the Time of Terror. It was the dogs, wild with fear, that gave me first the measure of our calamity. Sleep-dazed, with the “anguish of the beams’ complaining,” still in my ears, the air still quivering with the echoes of that stupendous noise, I looked out into as fair a morning as ever shone upon the world, calm fresh and smiling. Of the terrestrial tragedy there was no evidence because nightgowned, barefooted men and women [were] upon the curbs. They ran about aimlessly. Some knelt on the sidewalks as if praying; some rushed back into their houses and out again; some looked mutely at the serene sky. They wanted to know what had happened — what was to happen. Down across the dewy green of Duboce Park, a cloud hung housetop-high in the stirless air. It was not smoke but dust — the heavy dust of brick and mortar and concrete ground in the mills of the angry gods. That meant riven walls and crumbled chimneys. The houses, I could see, stood upright, after a fashion. Here was no sign of dire disaster. Walls could be made whole, chimneys and hearth could be piled brick on brick again.

But then came the dogs, couriers of the cataclysm — they had come far, for they ran slowly. Their jaws were dripping. They moaned and whined. All of them panted steadily up the steep hill. Then and thus I knew that, bad as it had been with us, on the hills, the darker chapters of the story of woe were to be read on the lowlands and in the valleys. We were shaken but safe; below us were nameless horrors, the dogs knew, and knowing, ran to the high places.

Soon, looming sinister and huge above the broken city, against the background of shining bay and Alameda’s hazy purple hills, toward the pillars of smoke that heralded the coming of Catastrophe’s twin sister, Calamity. I counted them — one far down toward the water end of Mission street; one in the heart of the teeming southside; one across a spur of our hill in Hayes Valley. These pillars, lifting skyward, were solemnly significant. Destruction was upon us, desolation was to come.

When I had noted water flung from a bath tub to the ceiling; glassware and china tossed across rooms; double hung pictures neatly reversed; plaster of cross-walls scribbled upon fantastically with seams and cracks by the hand that had, for a moment, gripped us — when I rejoiced again for a house built upon the rock — I went down into the hall from which the dogs had so early fled. Ruin by ruin, disaster by disaster, I saw how truly they had told the story.

Spent with running, paralyzed by the terror, a little yellow fice, [mongrel] cowering on my lawn against a stout, unbroken wall. She snarled when I chirruped to her that it was all right now.

On an afternight a sleek cocker, very weary, called upon us in the hurly-burly of a great newspaper’s army, called suddenly to fight the greatest of its battles. He was not hungry. What he wanted was human kindness. In his mouth he carried a big beef bone. When he lay down in utter weariness, he put his paw on it just as men with guns and clubs — on nearby streets — were standing guard over their little heaps of burnt and blistered, battered cans. I saw the Managing Editor reach down a grimy hand to pat the wanderer and was glad.

My friend’s wise terrier, remote and safe from the shock or fire, began at once on the first day of the tragedy to forage and to conceal. She is still burying supplies in a back yard planted thick with her instinctive provision against the famine, that mankind, proceeding objectively, has averted.

Among the miles of smoking ruins dogs wander seeking masters, some of whom are here and some in the hereafter. They have come back from the hills.

Oh, yes — the dumb brutes knew first and knew best. I shall never forget how, in the fair, sweet morning, I saw them as they ran, moaning and whining, with dripping jaws, panting steadily up the steep hill.

By Ernest S. SimpsonSan Francisco ChronicleMay 6, 1906

WRECK OF CITY’S BUILDINGS AWFUL

TENNESSEE HEADQUARTERS [at the Presidio] April 19. — No story will ever be written that will tell the awfulness of the thirty-hours following the terrible earthquake. No pen of the most powerful description the world ever saw could ever place on paper the impression of any one of the hundreds of thousands who felt the mighty tremble. No pen can record the sufferings of those who were crushed to death or buried in the ruins that encompassed them in an instant after 5:13 o’clock Wednesday morning.

It is just possible that the most dramatic point in San Francisco when that terrible rumble began was in the immediate vicinity of that imposing pile, San Francisco City Hall, that structure that cost millions upon millions to erect and years of labor to accomplish.

I was within a stone’s throw of that city hall when the hand of an avenging God fell upon San Francisco. The ground rose and fell like an ocean at ebb tide. Then came the crash. Tons upon tons of that mighty pile slid away from the steel framework and destructiveness of that effort was terrific.

I had just reached Golden Gate avenue and Larkin street and had tarried a moment to converse with a couple of policemen. With me were two local newspapermen. We had just bid good-bye to the offices, who proceeded down Larkin street to the City Hall Station. They had gotten midway in the block when the crash came.

I saw those policemen enveloped in a shower of falling stone. Their lives must have been blotted out in an instant. [They survived, but one officer was slightly injured. — G.H.]

“Keep in the middle of the street, Mac,” I shouted to one of my friends. “That is the only avenue of escape,” returned he. We staggered over the bitumen. It is impossible to judge the length of that shock. To me it seemed an eternity. I was thrown prone on my back

and the pavement pulsated like a living thing. Around me the huge buildings, looming up more terrible because of the queer dance they were performing wobbled and veered. Crash followed crash and resounded on all sides. Screeches rent the air as terrified humanity streamed out into the open in agony of despair.

Affrighted horses dashed headlong into ruins as they raced away in their abject fear. Then there was a lull. The most terrible was yet to come. The first portion of that shock was just a mild forerunning of what was to follow. The pause in the action

of the earth’s surface couldn’t have been more than a fraction of a second. It was sufficient, however, to allow me to collect myself. In the center of two streets rose to my feet. Then came the second and more terrific crash.

The street beds heaved in frightful fashion. The earth rocked and then came the blow that wrecked San Francisco from the bay shore to the Ocean Beach and from the Golden Gate to the end of the peninsula.

As if in sympathy for its immediate neighbor the old Supreme Court building [on Larkin St.] danced a frivolous dance and then tumbled into the street. Beneath that ruin of stone and brick were buried the two blue coated guardians of the police to whom I had been talking a few minutes before. That few minutes, however, seemed to me a century.

That second upheaval was heartrending. It made me thing of the loved ones in different portions of the country. It turned my stomach, gave me a heartache that I will never forget and caused me to sink upon my knees and pray to the Almighty God that me and mine should escape the awful fate I knew was coming to so many thousands.

Down Golden Gate avenue the houses commenced again their fantastic, ogreish dancing. One lone line of frame buildings tottered a moment and then just as a score or more of terror-stricken, white-shirted humanity to reach the open, it laid flat [A set of flats on Golden Gate between Hyde and Larkin]. The cries of those who must have perished reached my ears, and I hope that never again this side of the grave will I hear such signals of agony.

I turned about from that point of view to shut out the terrible sight, but what went on all sides seemed to be just a repetition of what I had already witnessed. Looking up Golden Gate avenue I saw tons and tons of brick and stone on beam end and then plunge into the street below. Then it was the idea flashed through my mind that God is merciful. What would have been the loss of life had the Almighty allowed that earthquake to occur in midday?

Suddenly, as sharply and as abruptly as it had begun, the end of the temblor came. Ruin endeavored, it seemed to outdo ruin. A world of structural work had found a resting place on mother earth. Bent steel girders and huge blocks of decorative stone made their sleeping place beside all this.

A cloud of deep dust hung tenaciously about the City Hall. I realized that there something dreadful had happened. I peered into the could, but I could not seen even a mark of that building. And as I waited the dust began to settle. First showed the steel shaft on which had for so long floated the country’s flag. imbedded in a ton of steel block, the entire mass had shifted many feet, but still maintained its position atop that pile of structural steel. As the wind carried the dust away and uncovered the ruins there stood a mountain sheared of all its crowning glory. It could be fittingly compared with a mountain that had passed through a forest fire.

The dome appeared like a huge birdcage against the morning dawn. The upper works of the entire building laid peaceably - if that term can be used - in the street below. I thought of those guardians of law ad order whose headquarters were in the basement of the hall on the McAllister and Larkin streets corner, and wondered if the sergeants and office men on duty had escaped. I thought of those angels of mercy nursing their patients in the Central Emergency Hospital and the physicians there, all of whom I knew from personal contact, and whom I had learned to respect and revere, not so much for their ability and cleverness, but because of their usefulness to me in my capacity as a newsgetter. I wondered if they had escaped death as they stood by to help the injured that might have been brought to them.

[Remarkably, the staff of the City Hall Police substation, and Central Emergency Hospital, escaped without injury, although the hospital staff was briefly trapped by fallen rubble. — G.H.]

After I had drawn myself together I found my way to my home, where, thank God, the wreck had not been as complete as many others I had witnessed. Then it was that I realized the condition of an excitement-crazed populace. Herds of huddled creates, attired in next to nothing, occupied the center of the streets, not knowing what would happen next or which way they should turn for safety. Each and every person I saw was temporarily insane. Laughing idiots commented on the fun they were having. Terror marked their faces, and yet their voices indicated a certain enjoyment that maniacs have when they kill and gloat over their prey. Women, hysterical to an extreme point, cried and raved for those they loved when they were standing at their elbow. Mothers searched madly for their children who had strayed, while little ones wailed for their protectors.

It was bedlam. Strong men bellowed like babies in their furor. All humanity within eyesight was suffering from palsy. No

one knew which way to turn, when on all sides of them destruction stared them in the very eye. A number of slight tremors followed the first seven series of shocks. As each came in term fearful agony spread over the countenances of the afflicted ones. Terror stamped its mark in every brow.

Then an unnatural light dimmed the rising sun and the word went forth from every throat: “The city is ablaze. We will all be burned. This must be the end of this wicked world.”

From down south of Market street the glare grew and grew. The flames show heavenward and licked the sky. It looked as if the end of the world was surely at hand.

For an hour more after that terrible shock, which shook the buildings of all San Francisco to the very foundations, people wandered about in an insane fashion. There was no attempt at concerted action to hold the sufferers. People were stupefied, and meanwhile the fire burned and burned.

Fred J. Hewitt

San Francisco Examiner

April 20, 1906