Lesson Focus: Vocabulary
(1) Study the picture
(2) Read slowly and carefully
(3) Look up words you don’t know
(4) Do the activities
Can you find my house? I’m going to describe my neighborhood, and you have to look at this top-down view of it to figure out which house is mine. You think that’s easy? Well, let’s see how easy it is. Pay attention to the clues!
My house is in a new neighborhood. Our neighborhood has many white fences that separate our backyards from each other. Some of our backyards are square, but most of them are oddly shaped. Mine is almost square. My fence separates my front and back yards, and it helps surround four backyards. There are only two fences that line a sidewalk in our neighborhood, touching it, and my house is very close to one of them.
I live in the cul-de-sac. These are really common in American neighborhoods. Seven of us live in this cul-de-sac, so you can count seven driveways. Not sure what a cul-de-sac is? It’s in the dead center of the photo!
The sidewalk cuts through all of our driveways. I think it’s odd that most of my neighbors in this cul-de-sac keep their cars parked on the driveway instead of in the garage. What if a hailstorm came and the falling ice balls damaged them? The hail wouldn’t damage my car!
Does that make it obvious? You’re not sure yet? Let’s keep going.
Cul-de-sacs are great because they give lots of space to turn around, and you never get any traffic but your neighbors, so it’s a pretty safe place for our kids to bike. This is really a great neighborhood for my kids to play. It’s safe to bike, and our neighbors have kids, too. Sometimes my kids go jump on their friend’s trampoline or play on their other friend’s jungle gym. They like the trampoline because they can jump really high and do some fun tricks, and they like the jungle gym because they can climb, slide, and swing on it.
Many of my neighbors have big fancy houses. You can see the rooves are complicated shapes with lots of different parts and angles. You can see that some of the rooves have different colors. That’s because there are many kinds of shingles you can use to roof your house. Shingles are waterproof sheets of material that overlap on your roof, the way feathers overlap on birds and scales overlap on snakes and many fish. They help keep the wind, rain, snow, and heat from damaging your house. The color of our shingles is the most popular color in our cul-de-sac.
I hope that’s not a dead giveaway!
There are many trees in my neighborhood! Some of us have lots of small trees in our backyards. Some have huge, towering trees, like the one I see in my rearview mirror when I back out of my garage. I like trees for the shade they give. I have a tree that gives us shade while we sit in our backyard, and my neighbor’s tree gives my house shade which helps it stay cool. I have more trees than him!
With a top-down view like this, you can see everything! You must have figured out which house is mine, right? This will help make you dead sure:
A lot of older houses don’t have roof vents. That’s one of the ways you can tell our neighborhood is new. Roof vents are important to help your roof breathe. They let the air go in and out of your roof. In the summer, it helps the heat escape, and in the winter, it helps keep your roof colder.
If your roof is too warm in the winter, snow can melt in the day and then freeze again at night, which makes ice accumulate on the roof, like the way wind blows leaves which accumulate in piles in the fall. That’s bad because ice accumulation can damage your roof or even fall on people! The number of roof vents on my house is greater than either of my left or right neighbors, but not greater than any of my neighbors behind me.
Have you figured it out? Can you see which house is mine from this top-down photograph of my neighborhood? I won’t give you any more clues. You’ll have to put your thinking cap on if you haven’t yet!