Sustainable Development- Natural Disasters

For the past two weeks, we have been focussing on natural disasters in the Sustainable Development module. I thought that I knew quite a bit about natural disasters, however, after sitting in the inputs for two weeks, I have since discovered that this is not the case.

In the first week of the topic, we looked at what natural disasters actually were. We were looking at types of natural disasters which I thought I had a relatively good understanding of, such as tornadoes, hurricanes and volcanoes. We then began to look at other aspects that come with natural disasters such as response and preparation, government involvement and case studies/differences in countries.

I was very surprised to see how much preparation goes into preparing for a natural disaster. This is something I had never really thought about before and so I do feel that I have a better understanding of this crucial part of the topic after further research and learning about it in class. We also looked at two different case studies that used different preparation strategies with very different outcomes. I always thought that different parts of the world just got these disasters worse than others but after these workshops I have come to discover that this is not the case. Infact, it depends on how well prepared a country is before and during these disasters what the outcome of the country will be.

We also looked at teaching this topic and if we would feel comfortable teaching this to primary school children. I feel that children do need to learn about this topic to inform them about current news issues and for the future in general but in a controlled and safe way. I think that the material we use needs to be appropriate for the age group and must be child friendly, e.g- not using pictures of dead bodies or talking excessively about death rates etc.

Another activity we looked at in a workshop during this topic was implementing this into the curriculum. We looked at different types of experiments that we could carry out in the classroom which was very interesting. We looked at using baking soda and vinegar to create a replica of a volcano exploding lava, making fossils out of clay and using maps to locate where different disasters occur. These experiments and activities can be used in cross curricular activities such as writing about volcanoes, labelling parts of a hurricane, writing news reports about a disaster and so on.

For our directed study task, we were asked to create a presentation to present to the other groups in our section. I wasn’t looking forward to doing this but once I had done it I felt better and even during it I felt quite confident presenting to the class which I was surprised about. I also found it interesting to learn about the other groups finding on other natural disasters.

Learning Log

Before this topic I thought I knew mostly all I needed to know about natural disasters but I have changed my view on this substantially. I would like to teach this in a class but I would be very careful to approach it in a way that is suitable for the age level. I feel that children would gain a lot because the topic is so cross curricular. I feel that a skill I have improved upon during this topic is the skill of time management because we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for the presentation we were asked to do. I did manage but I did have to manage my time very effectively which is something I will have to carry with me into my career as things can be thrown at us without warning. I think that the task benefited me as a result even though it was a bit of a struggle at the time. Overall, I have enjoyed learning more about this topic.