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AudioText
Student Edition
Unit 1, pp. 116–127
Narrative nonfiction tells the story of real people, places, or events. Notice the sequence in this Snapshot.
Yosemite became a national park in 1890 by an act of Congress. But Abraham Lincoln had started to preserve the American wilderness in 1864. It was then he signed the Yosemite Grant, which gave land to California.
Yosemite is a Native American name for grizzly bear. The park is located in the middle of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They stretch for 430 miles along California's eastern border. They cover 15.5 million acres. That's as big an area as Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut combined. The park itself is 1,170 square miles. That's about the size of Rhode Island.
Native Americans were the first people to live in Yosemite. Explorers saw it in the 1830s and 1840s, and the first tourists arrived in 1855. They came by horseback and on foot. That is how visitors even today must explore nearly all of Yosemite's wilderness.
More than 3.5 million people visit the park a year, mostly in the summertime. It is about four hours from San Francisco by car. Once there, Yosemite has many important places to see. Many people start by meeting a park naturalist.
Badger Pass opened in 1935. It was California's first ski slopes. Yosemite Valley is most people's first stop. Bridalveil Fall reaches 620 feet high. (More than half of America's highest waterfalls are in Yosemite.)
Giant sequoia trees grow there. Some are more than 2,500 years old. Wild animals include bears, mountain lions and bobcats, coyotes and big-horned sheep. People have counted more than 240 species of birds in Yosemite.
Glacier Point is a little over a half-mile above the floor of Yosemite Valley. The highest single waterfall in North America drops 1,612 feet from a cliff on the west side of El Capitan, the biggest block of granite on Earth. A glacier is on Mt. Lyell, which is 13,114 feet tall. Tioga Pass runs through the park. It is the highest highway pass in the Sierra Nevadas and in the entire state of California.
Yosemite is very impressive!
From Letters Home from Yosemite by Lisa Halvorsen, Blackbirch Press, © 2000, Blackbirch Press. Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.
Copyright © Pearson Education.
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Students should
set their own purposes
for reading.
Students may also
choose to read
something other
than the main
selection. For a
list of titles related
to lesson focus or
topic, see TR11.
Students can use the
question on p. 117 of the
student edition to set a purpose
for reading. Students
should look for supporting
details as they read to
help answer this question.
Students may also use the
KWL chart to set purposes.
If you began a
KWL Chart
on p. 114a, students can select a question in the W column to set purposes for reading. They can write notes in the L column as they read.  Independent Activities
Place English language learners in the groups that correspond to their reading abilities in English.
Group Time
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