Teacher Tips

Following Up

After the students have completed a story and mailed or printed their responses, consider using any of these activities to conclude their work:

Group students into teams of 3-5 people and ask them to share and discuss their responses. If they have worked on several stories at the same time, group them by story. Direct the groups to report the highlights of their discussion to the whole class.
Discuss the activity with the whole class, noting thoughts in a web chart or similar organizational chart. You can find some suggestions here.
What other information might students have given the main character in the story? Gather facts from text books, other printed reference books, or the Internet about the environmental health problem the story centered on.
Direct students to write an ending to the story, based on the information they have found.
Arrange a class debate for each story. Group students according to their opinions reflected in their story responses. Students should give logical and scientifically-based reasons for their opinions.
Create posters using the environmental health questions posed in each story.
Take the time to reflect on your lesson after it’s over. What worked for you? What didn’t? How did your kids react? If you had a chance to do something like this again, what might you do differently? Perhaps jotting a few notes on a printout of this or other site pages will help jog your memory the next time you use Inside Stories.

Use these plot lines, centered around other people who work at Reps, as the beginning point for other discussions or activities centered on environmental health. How would your students craft these stories to include scientific materials gathered from the web or print resources? What kind of a story, poem or play could they create using these plots? Perhaps they would like to interview people taking on the role of one of the main characters in the story.

George is trying to sell Maggie a maintenance contract for her heating and air conditioning system. But money is tight, and besides, what could go wrong? The system is supposed to be just a few years old. But a suspected case of Legionnaire’s Disease threatens to bring down the center. Some suspect that it’s just the flu making the rounds. But George is not so sure. How could he figure it out — and how fast can he do just that?
Tiki was just delighted when Reps opened. At last she had a place where she could sell her pretty bracelets. She gets them from an import shop in town and they sell pretty well. But, she’s heard a report that says that some imported jewelry might contain lead. She’s trying to track down the problem and has tested the jewelry she still has. But what should she do about the jewelry that she has already sold — and the people she has already sold them to?
Gerri has been very careful to stock Reps with earth-friendly products. But recently, she’s been hearing something about phthalates. What on earth are they? How come they are being called into question? And, most importantly, what can she use in place of what she already has - if Maggie will OK a costly restocking of the salon?

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