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Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek - John Branch, New York Times

Grades
8 to 12
  
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Experience the true story of a deadly avalanche and its aftermath through this 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning multimedia feature article. Rich with metaphors and imagery interwoven with...more
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Experience the true story of a deadly avalanche and its aftermath through this 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning multimedia feature article. Rich with metaphors and imagery interwoven with the narrative, the online article includes interactive maps, videos, and photographs. Discover the science behind avalanches in this exquisite example of informational text and narrative. The article sidebars share related slideshows and more. The story is long but well worth the time to fully experience.
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tag(s): descriptive writing (42), disasters (37), journalism (74), snow (18)

In the Classroom

Include this story (or portions of it) during your science study of motion, gravity, or weather with secondary students. (Our check of reading level found it to be approximately 8th grade). Experience the text on a projector or interactive whiteboard to annotate figures of speech that tell us even more than some of the images. Read and analyze it as an informational text in English class. (it's viewable on tablets, too!). Discuss how the author uses media as part of the writing instead of as an add-on. For journalism and other writing classes, you may want to have your students read the accompanying article "http://source.opennews.org. US/articles/how-we-made-snow-fall/ How We Made Snow Fall to analyze how the interactive and graphics departments at the New York Times worked with the text of the story to make the graphics and video a seamless part of the "reading". Challenge student groups to investigate a true story of a weather event or other actual occurrence through a combination of media and writing, explaining the science concepts along the way. Share their projects using one of the multimedia tools available from the TeachersFirst Edge. Expecting a snow day? Share this on your class web page for your literature or science class as a productive way to spend the day. Teachers of gifted can share this as an example of a project that can draw on a student's interests in science, art, and writing. Challenge students to try one. If you teach journalism, you could make the two articles an entire unit as you discuss the changing role of print vs. web-based writing in the 21st century.