silent visitors' center lookout point woods slippery
Draw a picture
In the text the writer uses some analogies:
Match:
grey soup
theater curtains
an old shoelace
Try to put the adverbs into the gaps:
silently
eventually
steamily
hopefully
heavily
suddenly
impulsively
cautiously
I drove through a snow-whitened landscape
toward the Grand Canyon. It was hard to believe that this was the last week of
April. Mists and fog swirled about the road. I could see nothing at the sides
and ahead of me except the occasional white smear
of oncoming headlights. By the time I reached the entrance to
Grand Canyon National Park, and paid the $5 admission, snow was dropping
1. ______ again, thick white flakes so big that their
undersides carried shadows.
The road through the park followed the southern lip of the
canyon for 30 miles. Two or three times I stopped in turnouts and went to the
edge to peer 2.________ into the silent murk,
knowing that the canyon was out there, just beyond my nose, but I couldn't see
anything. The fog was everywhere - threaded among the trees,
adrift on the roadsides, rising 3. _______ off the pavement.
It was so thick I could kick holes in it.
Afterwards, I trudged toward the visitors' center, perhaps
200 yards away, but before I got there I came across a snow-spattered sign
announcing a lookout point half a mile away along a trail through the woods,
and 4.________ I went down it, mostly just to get
some air.
The path was slippery and took a long time
to traverse, but on the way the snow stopped falling and the air felt clean
and refreshing.5. _______ I came to a platform of
rocks, marking the edge of the canyon. There was no fence to keep you back from
the edge, so I shuffled 6._________ over and looked down, but
could see nothing but grey soup.
A middle-aged couple came along and as we stood chatting
about what a dispiriting experience this was, a miraculous
thing happened. The fog parted. It just 7._______ drew back, like a
set of theater curtains being opened, and 8. _________ we saw
that we were on the edge of a sheer, giddying drop
of at least a thousand feet.
Discuss: which title is more suitable for this
text?
The Grand Canyon in Winter / A Magical Experience
Use some of the adjectives:
A grey __________
A sheer ___________
A miraculous _________
A refreshing __________
A slippery ____________
A silent _________
Beginning
Down below you on the canyon floor
The scale of
Indeed
The thing that gets
you
Ending
overwhelming
insignificant
would reach you
by this mighty hole
sound
comprehension
it
shoelace
___________ the Grand Canyon is almost beyond____________.
It is 10 miles across, a mile deep, 180 miles long. You could set the Empire
State Building down in it and still be thousands of feet above ___________. ________,
you could set the whole of Manhattan down inside it and you would still be so
high above it that buses would be like ants and people would be invisible,
and not a sound __________.
_____________- that gets everyone - is the silence. The
Grand Canyon just swallows__________. The sense of space and emptiness is __________.
Nothing happens out there._____________, far, far away, is the thing that
carved it: the Colorado River. It is 300 feet wide, but from the canyon's lip
it looks thin and _________. It looks like an old__________.
Everything is dwarfed _________.
1. Driving to the Grand Canyon
________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
2. It was late when we finally
found the restaurant ___________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
3. To our horror, the airbed had a
hole in it, _________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
4. It’s hard to describe in words the
grandeur _______________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
5. We drove around the south rim, ________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
6. Luckily, we found a spot _______________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
7. We ate, then went to the desert
watchtower _____________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
1 .___________________________________
was an experience in itself.
2. _________________________________________
where they let is put up our tent behind the building.
3. ____________________________________________________
so we had another uncomfortable night’s
sleep.
4. ___________________________________________
and beauty of this natural phenomenon.
5. ___________________________________________
which has superb views down into the canyon itself, until we found a campsite.
6. __________________________________________________
even though it was peak season.
7. ____________________________________________________
to watch the sun going down – just amazing.
The sound of drumming
A beautiful voice
An embarrassed person
A busy airport
A dishonest politician
A sad defeated old man
Write a short vivid piece of writing about an amazing
place you've visited.
First, discuss the following things with someone:
Why did you go there?
What did you know about the place
before you went?
What were you expecting to see or
experience in that place?
What were your first impressions
on arriving?
Did the experience live up to your
expectations?
Did your plans change at all for
any reason?
What was the weather like?
What was the most memorable
moment?
What did you learn from this
experience?
Now Jot down some words about the following things:
your five senses – what did you hear, smell, taste, touch,
see?
your emotions before, during and after the experience
the weather or atmosphere of the place
the most important or memorable moment
things that make this place so unique or special or
personally meaningful to you
Language
Throw in a few adjectives - maybe even two or three
together (clear blueish glassy water, fluffy creamy white clouds)
Use some vivid verbs and verbs of
movement – rush, shine, transcend, fade, flow, speed, heave, stumble
Use some adverbs – we sat quietly watching,
I felt extremely uneasy, unexpectedly they
started to shout at us….
