Unit5 Humans and Nature Lesson 1 A sea story 教案-2025-2026学年高中英语北师大版必修第二册

Language Competence: Enable students to master core words and phrases like whirlpool, survive, risk doing sth and relative clauses with adverbs, and improve their ability to read for details and retell the story.

Cultural Awareness: Guide students to understand the dialectical relationship between humans and nature, respect the power of nature and establish the concept of harmonious coexistence.

Thinking Quality: Cultivate students’ logical thinking by sorting out the story context and critical thinking by analyzing the narrator’s feelings and choices.

Learning Ability: Help students master reading strategies such as predicting and skimming, and develop autonomous and cooperative learning abilities through group activities.

Key Points: Understand the main plot and the narrator’s emotional changes in the sea story, master the usage of core vocabulary and phrases related to natural disasters, and grasp the application of relative clauses with adverbs (when, where, why) in context.

Difficult Points: Analyze the symbolic meaning of the whirlpool and the narrator’s psychological changes, and correctly use the learned language knowledge to express views on the relationship between humans and nature.

Step 1: Lead-in (Lead-in and Prediction)

The teacher starts the class by showing students pictures and short video clips of sea storms and whirlpools, and asks the following questions in English: “Have you ever heard of sea stories? What do you think will happen in a sea story? If you are caught in a sea storm, how will you feel and what will you do?” Then, the teacher writes down the key words and phrases mentioned by students on the blackboard, such as “fear”, “struggle”, “survive”, “wave” and “storm”, and briefly explains the new word “whirlpool” with the help of pictures. After that, the teacher guides students to look at the title “A Sea Story” and the author’s information (adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story), and asks them to predict the content of the story: “Who is the narrator of the story? What terrible things happened to him at sea? Will he survive in the end?”

Design Intention: This link uses audio-visual materials to create a real sea disaster scene, which can quickly attract students’ attention and arouse their interest in learning. By asking questions and encouraging students to predict, it can activate students’ existing knowledge reserve and life experience, lay a foundation for the subsequent reading of the text. At the same time, it can naturally lead to the new words and key topics related to the text, reducing the difficulty of students’ understanding of the text.

Step 2: Pre-reading (Vocabulary and Background Preview)

First, the teacher arranges students to work in groups of 4 to learn the core vocabulary and phrases of the lesson. The vocabulary list includes: whirlpool, survive, risk doing sth, horrible, rapidly, extent, tube, float, tie to sth, escape from, on the edge of, all at once. Each group is responsible for explaining 2-3 words or phrases, including pronunciation, part of speech, meaning and example sentences. For example, the group responsible for “whirlpool” can explain: “Whirlpool is a noun, which means a powerful circular current of water that pulls things down into it. For example, The boat was caught in a whirlpool and could not get out.” The teacher walks around the classroom to guide students, corrects their pronunciation and usage errors, and supplements relevant example sentences combined with the text context.

Then, the teacher briefly introduces the background of the story: “This story is adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘A Descent into the Maelström’. Edgar Allan Poe is a famous American writer, and his works are often full of suspense and horror. The Maelström mentioned in the story is a real tidal whirlpool in the Norwegian Sea, which is very powerful and

dangerous. This background introduction can help you better understand the danger faced by the narrator in the story.”

Finally, the teacher checks the students’ vocabulary mastery by asking random questions, such as “What does ‘risk doing sth’ mean? Can you make a sentence with it?” or “What is the Chinese meaning of ‘float’?”

Design Intention: Vocabulary is the foundation of understanding the text. By adopting the group cooperative learning mode, students can actively participate in the learning process, improve their learning enthusiasm and cooperative ability. The background introduction helps students understand the authenticity and danger of the story, so that they can better empathize with the narrator’s feelings. The random check can timely grasp the students’ vocabulary mastery and make up for the weak links in time.

Step 3: While-reading (Intensive Reading and Information Extraction)

Activity 1: Skimming for Main Idea

The teacher asks students to read the text quickly (skimming) and answer the following questions: 1. Who are the main characters in the story? 2. What happened to the narrator and his brothers at sea? 3. What is the ending of the story? After students finish reading, the teacher invites several students to answer the questions, and then summarizes the main idea of the text: “The story tells about the narrator and his two brothers who were caught in a terrible storm and a whirlpool when they were returning from fishing. The narrator survived by tying himself to a barrel, while his two brothers may have died.”

Design Intention: Skimming is an important reading strategy. Through this activity, students can quickly grasp the main plot of the text, establish a general understanding of the text, and lay a foundation for the subsequent intensive reading. At the same time, it can train students’ ability to extract key information quickly.

Activity 2: Scanning for Specific Information

The teacher asks students to read the text again carefully (scanning) and fill in the following table, which includes four parts: Time, Events, The Narrator’s Feelings and Key Details. The teacher gives a sample first: “About three years ago, something terrible happened to the narrator. His feelings were frightened and hopeless.” Then, students work in pairs to complete the table. After that, the teacher invites several pairs to present their answers, and corrects and supplements them. The key points to be emphasized are: 1. The process of the storm coming: all at once, the sky was covered with dark clouds, a huge wave covered the boat, and the younger brother fell into the sea. 2. The narrator’s feelings changed from frightened and hopeless to calmer, then curious, and finally lucky. 3. The three important observations made by the narrator in the whirlpool and his decision to tie himself to a barrel to escape.

Design Intention: Scanning can help students accurately extract specific information from the text, sort out the development context of the story and the changes of the narrator’s feelings. The pair work mode can promote the communication and cooperation between students, and help them complement each other’s advantages and improve their ability to extract and organize information. The table can make the information more intuitive and clear, which is convenient for students to review and consolidate.

Activity 3: Analyzing Language Points and Sentence Structures

The teacher selects several key sentences from the text to analyze, focusing on the usage of relative clauses with adverbs and the expression of feelings. 1. “That was the day when it took only six hours to break my body and soul.” The teacher explains: “This is a relative clause, where ‘when’ is a relative adverb, referring to the time ‘the day’, and it acts as an adverbial in the clause. We can also say ‘That was the day on which it took only six hours to break my body and soul.’” Then, the teacher asks students to find other relative clauses with adverbs in the text, such as “One day, my two brothers and I were coming back from the islands where we often risked going and got more fish than others.” and “I was still tied to the barrel and the waves soon carried me to an area where other fishermen lived.”, and asks them to analyze the usage of “where” in these sentences. 2. “I felt sick, as if I was falling from a mountain top in a dream.” The teacher explains: “This sentence uses the structure ‘as if’ to express the narrator’s feeling of fear. ‘As if’ means ‘as though’, and it can be followed by a clause.