Ramp Up your English

Episode 6 Streamliners and Conjunctions: Cause and Effect

Cause and Effect and Streamliners!

Welcome to Episode 6 of Ramping Up your English!

Episode Description

See the Streamliner in the picture below?

This snowy scene features one of the Daylight  trains from Southern Pacific Railroad. Episode 6 has now been produced and is ready to be cablecast on RVTV Voices

I spent many days driving this tractor. Sometimes I would see Southern Pacific’s Sunset Limited pass at the edge of the field. I always waved.

And the tractor view? That all has to do with the Sunset Limited and my discovery of this great train. Viewers will find this episode on Ashland Home Network channel 15 and Charter channel 182 in Southern Oregon.  You can watch Episode 6 right now by following the link. Additionally, you can watch this episode ad-free at the this link. You can also download the program from this link.

My childhood dream was to ride the Sunset Limited. Thanks to Amtrak, I did.

Episode 6 centers on Streamliners; fast, modern, comfortable, and elegant trains designed by the railroads to lure passengers back to the rails after World War II.  Back from where?  From the highways and airways.  Learn all about it in episode 6. We’ll also begin our Eastward journey from Los Angeles to New Orleans aboard the Sunset Limited.

Click here to watch segment One of this episode.

Click for Segment 2 and Segment 3.

Language Objectives

We’ll learn to use a variety of conjunctions to demonstrate a simple cause/effect relationship.  We’ll also get more patterning in relating past events.

Academic Content Objectives

Transportation: Relate the cause/effect relationship resulting in the decline of passenger rail travel in the United States in the years following World War II. Design: Describe design features that made streamlined trains attractive to passengers and transferred to the redesign of multiple objects on the market. History: Identify the root causes of the decline in passenger railroads in the United States and the rationale for the establishment of Amtrak.

Video Clips Used in Episode 6

Streamliners

Family Support

Taste of Sunset Limited

Lesson Slides

These slides supported our lessons on using conjunctions to relate cause and effect.

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The conjunction BECAUSE ties cause and effect together

More Slides below

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The word SINCE signals that we’re dealing with cause and effect.

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The words DUE TO can be used together to show a cause/effect relationship

We used these slides as well:

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Here are the conjunctions we used in this lesson to convey cause and effec

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Homework Challenge

Use the sentence frames and the sentence construction chart above to make sentences demonstrating cause/effect relationships.  Remember, you may have to change the wording a bit to make your sentence sound right. I suggest making at least 10 sentences.

Recommended Links

The train on the tee shirt I wore for this show is Southern Pacific’s Daylight train.  You can see the locomotive ate the Oregon Rail Heritage Center in Portland.

Train ride anyone? Check out Southern Oregon Live Steamers to see when they offer free rides to the public.

Check out this visit to Medford’s Railroad Park – an episode of Adventures in Education with host John Letz. Click here.

Acknowledgements

Information about Streamliners came from Wikipedia as well as other online sites and from Trains magazine.

Tech Info

I also want to thank my technical crew at RVTV for all the work that has to be done to produce a program like this.  Lighting was accomplished by David Wilson and Gary Mark Roberts.  I find that lighting can be the trickiest element to tame in setting up a TV program.  If lighting is done well, no one notices it, so it can easily be taken for granted. It shouldn’t be.  It’s a lot of work to effectively light up a set.  It often involved climbing up ladders to re-position lights, and constantly viewing the set and the people to see that the lighting is just right.  I’m blessed with crew members who can set up the lighting while I attend to other aspects of the television production.  While we assign lighting to a single crew member, there are often several people working on lighting. This episode was produced on August 24, 2015 at the Digital Media Center on the campus of Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon.

Permission

Feel free to watch this episode and all others as many times as you wish.  You can also download Episode 6 and others.  All Ramping Up your English Episodes and bonus videos are licensed under Creative Commons. That means that you can use the program for non-commercial use.  You can even use just part of the program.  Just be sure to give me credit for what you use (John Letz or LetzCreate) and use a similar license to give others the same permission for your work containing what you got from me.  That’s called Share alike. That’s why you see NC (non Commercial), BY (give me credit) and SA (Share alike).

Next Episode

So where do we go from Episode 6?  Click here to visit the Episode 7 page and learn about Passenger Trains.