NatGeo Explorer and journalist takes students on a journey into the Peruvian Amazon.
Journalist Florence Goupil visited two second grade classes at Jefferson Elementary School in the Santa Ana Unified School District. Goupil is a Peruvian documentary photographer and National Geographic Explorer. She was able to share her work as a journalist, specifically a recent story that was published in the Washington Post in the summer of 2023. Her work documented the last fluent speaker of an indigenous language spoken in the village of Callería, deep in the Peruvian Amazon. The second graders that attended the journalist visit are part of a unique Spanish Immersion program where classroom instruction is done in both Spanish and in English. Through her presentation, Goupil engaged students in Spanish, but she was also able to teach the students some words in Isokonawan, the language spoken in Callería! The students had just completed a lesson on habitats, so this timely presentation allowed them to delve into a part of the globe they had not previously learned about. After learning about the languages and habitat of the Peruvian Amazon, students worked on their writing assignments, answering questions related to Goupil’s presentation.
