Starting a collection

Each Monday, the back page of the Outlook section is devoted stories about nature. In fact, the page itself is entitled "Nature". This page often contains a short, very attractive column with an interesting or surprising fact about animals or plants. I have reproduced seven examples on this page. Just cut them out and you already have a good start on an interesting and fun collection.

The purpose of this lesson is to help you become familiar with the column and to give you some ideas about how to use it to improve your English. Let's begin with an easy example. Notice that you don't have to understand every word to understand the main idea.

Do you know what mother crocodiles feed their babies? Nothing. Like other reptiles, newly-hatched crocodiles are ready to fend for themselves although they normally hand around near their mothers during the first few weeks. The young crocs feed on insects and other small animals. As they grow, they gradually shift to larger prey.

This nature fact is easy to understand since the question is answered in one word. Once you know the answer it is easy to guess the meanings of words and phrases that you might not know. Take the phrase "fend for themselves", for example. Obviously, it must mean "take care of themselves". Similarly, "newly-hatched" must mean "newly-born" and if you know that baby crocodiles are born from eggs, you can guess that "hatch" means to break out of an egg. Finally, prey must refer to the insects and animals (the victims) the crocodile catches for its food.

Be sure to watch for new columns as they appear in the Monday Outlook of your Bangkok Post. If you have your own copy, cut them out and add them to your collection.

Following are six more examples of the nature facts column. Read each one to get the main idea and try to guess the meanings of any unfamiliar words or phrases. Finally, without memorising the text, think of how you would explain the information to someone else in English.

Have you ever wondered if fishes have to develop more scales as they grow bigger? They probably would if their scales remained the same size all their lives. But the truth is fish scales get bigger every year. And like trees, they have growth rings which can be seen through a microscope. Have you ever wondered what would happen to a rodent if it stopped gnawing on things? The answer: It may die from starving! This is because rodents’ teeth never stop growing, and unless the animals frequently gnaw on hard stuff, their teeth will grow so long they can’t chew food. Do you know how hunters tell there are bears around by looking at certain trees? It’s easy. The animals like to climb trees to look for honey and fruits. And their claw marks on the tree trunks reveal their presence. Have you ever wondered if a turtle and a tortoise competed in a race, which would win? It depends. If the race took place at a stadium, surely the tortoise would reach the finish line ahead of the turtle whose paddle-like flippers make it clumsy on land. However, if the contest occurred in the sea, surely the turtle would be the winner. And in this case, it is likely the tortoise would not just lose the race but also its life, because it can’t swim! Do you know what the octopus uses its arms for? Not for tickling other octopuses, of course. The animal – which turns to jet propulsion when it wants to move quickly – uses its arms to cling to rocks and to "walk" around on the sea floor, as well as to catch prey. By the way, this predatory mollusc is the smartest in the mollusc world which also includes snails and oysters, among others. Can you guess who gets to eat first when a pride of lions feed? Some may guess it’s "ladies first", but that’s not the case. Although it is usually the lionesses who do the hunting, when the food is caught males have the first choice, then the females – and the cubs eat last.

This is truly a "classic lesson". It is almost exactly the same as a Post Tips lesson I wrote in November of 1998. All I have done differently this time is to find new examples. The lesson still works very well just as it was originally written.

It is usually easy to identify the teachers who are most experienced and most comfortable using the Bangkok Post with their classes. They are the ones who make frequent use of their scissors, cutting out stories, pictures, or cartoons for later use. Sometimes they collect single stories for a reading lesson, but often they will cut out many different examples of a single type of story or column to help their students quickly become familiar with the subject. This week's lesson is a good example of this technique, but I could just as easily have used examples of a comicstrip like Garfield or Blondie or several news stories on pollution.

I suggest you divide your class into six groups (or 12 if you want to make group sizes smaller) and set up an information gap activity. As you will remember from last week, such an activity is done in two phases. First, each group is assigned to prepare one of the columns so that each member is able to explain it in English. In the next phase, new groups are formed with each member coming from a group having prepared a different article. Since each member has prepared different information, an information gap has been created. Each member explains his or her story to the other members.

For those of you who did not see last week’s lesson, I have repeated the diagram illustrating how to organise your class to form a new group with each member knowing different information.

Information gap activities start with the class separated into groups. Each group works with different information. Students are then regrouped into new groups with each member coming from a different initial group. They then share information to bridge the information gap.

Next week: Advice columns from Ann Landers and Dear Abby.