Tool Tuesday: National Parks are just “meh”

Clinicians and educators are always looking for high-interest materials that naturally invite both narrative and expository language use. I lead a session each semester at Boston University in which graduate students in speech-language pathology analyze various picture books for their narrative and expository content. One of the guiding questions is always “What’s your post-activity?” How can this book be used to engage and to practice key academic skills such as mapping the story (or on the expository side, the List, Sequence, Description, Compare-Contrast, and so on)? Another target in the workshop is exemplifying materials that are useful in grabbing the attention of older students, while using methodologies such as Story Grammar Marker^® and ThemeMaker^®.

Subpar Parks: America’s Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors by Amber Share offers a unique, fun, and humorous example, with many possible post-activities, along with narrative and expository mapping. Share “entered the chat” through her hilarious Instagram, where she started sharing beautiful vector art of national (and later, international and other) parks inspired by one-star Yelp reviews complaining about the user’s experience visiting these natural treasures. These posts were compiled in her first book, combined with brief, readable text passages on each park, creating a great opportunity to explore perspective, story grammar, and expository structures in meaningful and memorable ways.

As a National Park nerd, I was “naturally” drawn to this content. At its core, Subpar Parks juxtaposes two contrasting perspectives: the awe-inspiring reality of national parks and the often comically negative interpretations of visitors who were apparently expecting something else. Students are naturally drawn to the humor (“Too cold!” “Too many rocks!”), relatable examples of complaints the students themselves might pose about long road trips. At the same time, the content invites thinking about the schema of National Park Settings while exploring expository text, as well as finding narratives and exposition in social media.

Each entry provides an opportunity to build the hidden story behind the review:

Students could be guided to contrast the review in question with others on Yelp or TripAdvisor, thus practicing exploring a range of narrative and expository texts. This aligns well with social cognition and flexible thinking goals, encouraging students to recognize that the same situation can generate very different stories.

Additional activities could include researching news stories from the same park, or imagining them, and creating alternate subpar or par stories. It would be easy to create images similar to the subpar park reviews with a Google Slides Template, along with using MindWing’s Digital Icons to elaborate on stories and explanations.

Try this template (File link) Make a Copy to save to your drive, click Background to search for Google Images to replace this Acadia Beehive trail photo, and change the text.

The national parks provide a natural context for teaching descriptive and expository text structures with MindWing’s Maps, particularly according to these attributes:

• Category: National park
• Location: State/region
• Features: Mountains, geysers, deserts, forests
• Climate: Hot, cold, wet, dry
• Wildlife: Animals and ecosystems
• Activities: Hiking, camping, sightseeing, swimming, rafting

Additional ideas:

• Google provides “virtual field trips” to National Parks!
• Use books on Epic Books for Kids! for additional expository text
• Take a quiz on the locations of the National Parks
• Create Yelp reviews of other locations and experiences using this Google Slides template

Have fun exploring the parks! Well, more fun than the reviewers in question…