Hootie’s Story Nest: Coach Green

🎧 Show Notes

Hootie’s Story Nest – Episode 3

Featuring Coach Green, PHPS Science Teacher

Welcome back to Hootie’s Story Nest, part of the PHPS Difference Podcast Summer Series!

In this episode, Coach Green, our PHPS Science Teacher, shares an exciting selection from I Survived the Japanese Tsunami, 2011 by Lauren Tarshis. Listeners will follow Ben, a young boy visiting Japan, as he experiences one of the most powerful natural disasters in modern history. Through courage, resilience, and determination, this story brings science, history, and storytelling together in an unforgettable way.

🌟 In This Episode

•  A read-aloud from I Survived the Japanese Tsunami, 2011
•  An introduction to the real-life events surrounding the 2011 tsunami in Japan 
•  Coach Green's favorite book recommendations: 
  • The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien 
  • The Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien 
•  A connection between science, history, and storytelling 
•  A celebration of courage, perseverance, and resilience 

🎯 Our Goal

To inspire a love of reading, spark curiosity about the world around us, and help students discover how books can teach us about science, history, and the human experience.

📚 Keep Listening

Join us each week as a new PHPS teacher shares their favorite stories and helps keep our students connected to books all summer long.

💛 Special Thanks

Before we wrap up, we want to give full credit to the authors, illustrators, and publishers of the books shared in today’s episode. These excerpts are shared to celebrate and support reading. Hootie’s Story Nest is an educational summer series on the PHPS Difference Podcast, created to inspire a love of reading, spark curiosity, and keep students connected to books all summer long.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hi everyone, I'm Carmen. I'm a PHPS Owl. Welcome to Hootie's Join Up. We missed you this summer, so we're sharing some of our favorite books with you. Each week, a teacher will read a fun part of a story and tell you about other books you might like. So get comfy and enjoy today's story. Have a great day.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Hi, PHPS readers. We're so excited to have Coach Green here with us today to talk about books, summer reading, and a few of his favorite recommendations. So welcome, Coach Green.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

We're happy to have you. Um, we'd love to know what you're gonna do this summer before we hop into what you've chosen to read to us.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

We're gonna be doing a lot of relaxing. Uh our family is going to Florida this summer, so the big ticket of the trip is we're going to Cape Canaveral to see where NASA launches our rockets and visit the museum and the rocket garden and all that kind of things. We're going to Universal Studios.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Sounds like a perfect trip for a science teacher. It'll be lovely. I love that. To bring lots of cool things back to share with our students in the fall.

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Yeah, it's gonna be great. Well, we see you've got a couple books with you.

SPEAKER_02 1:16

I do.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Do you mind sharing with our readers what you brought?

SPEAKER_02 1:19

Uh I'm gonna read a book from the I Survive series. Uh this particular one is about the Japanese tsunami in 2011. Um, it's written by Lauren Tarshish and illustrated by Scott Dawson, published by Scholastic. Uh this series of books is historical fiction. Um it kind of tells you the story about important historical events and gives you an on-the-ground look, usually from a younger person's perspective.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

That's awesome. Yeah. I also love that they have the graphic novel version, um, especially for just kids that need a different entry point. And so you can read both and um have that same experience, but it's a little bit of a different reading level. So I think that's awesome. We can't wait to hear. All right.

SPEAKER_02 2:08

At first the wave was tiny. It was just a ripple in the huge Pacific Ocean, but it moved quickly, faster than a jet. And as I got closer to Japan's coast, it got bigger. It grew and grew until it was a monstrous wall of water, dozens of feet high, hundreds of miles long. It destroyed everything in its path. The waves smashed into crowded cities, knocking down buildings, swallowing factories, chewing up highways and bridges. It washed away beautiful villages, flattening pine forests and turning rice fields into seas of mud and garbage. In quiet fishing towns, boat boats tumbled like dice into the streets, smashing into shops and homes. Eleven-year-old Ben Kudo saw the wave coming as he stood on a street in the tiny village of Shogahama. At first it looked to him as if a cloud of smoke was rising up over the ocean. Was it a ship on fire? But then a siren blared, terrified voices shouted out. Ben didn't speak Japanese, but he understood one word, tsunami.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Ooh, very good thing. Yes. I think our kids will love this. And I love this series too because there's a lot of books. Yes. Um, so there's a lot of choice. And um, I think that the students will be excited to pick that one up this summer. Yeah. They fly off the shelf here at Preston Hollow. And students could also find them on Learning Ally, uh, which all of our kids have access to. So that's awesome. Um, before we go, we really like to ask all of our guests what is something that you like to read when you were little or a genre that you were interested in.

SPEAKER_02 3:44

Um as a child and still now, um fantasy and fiction books were my favorite. Um I read The Hobbit by J.R. Tolkien probably 10 times when I was a kid. That's awesome. I actually recently reread The Lord of the Rings books.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

So that's great. Yeah, I love an episodic journey. Heroes' journey is a fantastic thing for our kids to dive into. Well, thank you so much, Ryan, for being here. And we can't wait to hear how excited our kids are about reading the I Survive series. So thank you. Yes, and before we wrap up, we want to give full credit to the authors, illustrators, and publishers of the books shared in our episode today. These excerpts are shared to celebrate and support reading. Hootie's Story Nest is an educational summer series on the PHPS Difference Podcast, created to inspire love of reading, spark curiosity, and keep students connected to books all summer long.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Thank you for listening to the PHPS Difference Podcast. See you next time.