Hey, teachers! How are you doing?

I used the Password series (Editora Ática) for many years with my high schoolers and I really liked its reading strategies exercises and how grammar was presented. Another great aspect of Password was cultural awareness, raised in the pre-reading sections.

One of the text that caught my attention was The Circle of Life. It talked about the never-ending dilemma and battle between man and nature, according to the native American point of view. It also has several uses of the Present Perfect tense and how here’s your turn: how would you work with this text in your English class?

Enjoy!

The Indians love the sky and the clouds, trees and animals, mountains, rocks, and rivers. Man’s feeling of identity with nature is beautifully expressed in a poem about one of the Pueblo, a tribe of Indians of north America, who used to live in the Southwest of what is now the United States. The poem gives us the thoughts of an Indian on life and death. It shws how the Indians accepted their place in the beautiful plan of nature. All living things, the poem tells us, share the Earth. When we die, we give back to nature what we have borrowed.

The Circle of life

I have killed the deer,
I have crushed the grasshopper
And the plants he feeds upon,
I have cut through the heart
of trees growing old and straight.

I have taken fish from water
and birds from the sky.
In my life I have needed death
So that my life can be.

When I die, I must give life
To what has nourished me.

The Earth receives my body
And gives it to the caterpillars,
To the birds and to the coyotes
Each in its own time
So that the circle of life
Is never broken.

Referência: “Password Special Edition” – Amadeu Marques, Editora Ática, 2002.