Audiences Educators Other activities (all grades)

Other activities (all grades)

Newspaper monitoring project

This activity consists of tracking articles that relate to a specific disaster in different newspapers. The students then analyze the articles and categorize the disaster based on several criteria. For example:

• Did the disaster have a local, national or international impact?
  
• Was it a natural disaster or was it caused by human activity?
  
• Was it mainly geological, biological, atmospheric, etc?
  

Students could also provide their personal analysis of the potential effects of the disaster.

This activity could be conducted over a long or short period of time, and could easily reach several curriculum objectives (i.e. English writing, Web research skills, geography, history).

Video Project

If your school has the resources to do a video project, have students put together a video that explains what to do before, during and after a disaster of their choice. The students could be responsible for both the research and production of the video.

Emergency preparedness is an important social responsibility and a student-made video could be an excellent way to instruct the student body on your community's history of disasters and on its emergency preparedness plan.

The Natural Hazards of Canada Map and the Canadian Disaster Database could be helpful resources for this project.