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Lesson Plan Natural Disasters: Nature's Fury

People have always tried to understand the natural world in which they live. In early times, they created myths to explain their experiences with fire, flood and other violent forces. Over the centuries, new scientific discoveries added to their knowledge. Yet, nature continues to affect human lives and people still seek to record their feelings about these uncontrollable forces.

Examine accounts by Americans from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of their life changing experiences with nature. Witness their experiments with the new technologies of motion pictures and panoramic photography to record the immensity of events with which they struggled. Read their moving personal accounts. Study the poignant lyrics of songs they wrote to memorialize each event. Use your research skills to search the Library of Congress online collections to broaden your understanding of how people have dealt with disaster. Then share your learning by creating a presentation for others in which you assume the role of a witness to such an event and create your own personal account.

Objectives

Students will be able to:

  • Read and discuss literary and nonliterary texts in order to understand human experience.
  • Read to acquire information from a variety of sources.
  • Orally communicate information, opinions, and ideas effectively to an audience for a particular purpose.
  • Interpret history using a variety of sources, such as biographies, diaries, journals, artifacts, eyewitness interviews, and other primary source materials.

Time Required

Three to four weeks

Lesson Preparation

Before you begin:

  • Check your library or media center to see what historical fiction and resources are available to support research on American natural disasters.
  • Students should have background in searching the Library's online collections. Refer to "Using Primary Sources" on the Teachers page to assist them.

Materials

Resources

Lesson Procedure

In this lesson, explore the ways natural disasters have affected American lives. Examine records people made of their experiences. Try to find out how people felt who lived through each event. How did they recover? What changed because of their experience? What lessons did they learn? When you finish, put yourself into the shoes of an eyewitness to one of American history's most remarkable events and tell the story of the disaster in your own words.

Activity One: Introduction (one class period)

These activities introduce students to the concept of primary source documents as ways of recording an historical event.

  1. On the board or overhead, brainstorm ways in which nature affects people's lives.
  2. Play a song about a natural disaster.
  3. While listening to the song, students write five words or phrases from the song that interest them on a note card. On the back of the card, they should write their reactions to those words or phrases.
  4. Discuss the following questions:
    • Why would the songwriter compose this song?
    • What event may have sparked the idea for this song?
    • What words or phrases help you to understand the songwriter's perspective of the event?
    • How does listening to this song change your understanding of the people's emotions who experienced the event?
  5. Next, show students a photo related to the event. Repeat the 5 word reflection activity and group discussion.
  6. Finally, present a newspaper story with a personal account of the event. Repeat the 5 word reflection activity and group discussion.
  7. Pass out an encyclopedia or history book description of the disaster.
  8. Using a Venn diagram, have students compare and contrast the kinds of information about the event each medium provided.
  9. Reflection Journal: have students explain how these sources differ from encyclopedia accounts of the event.

Activity Two: Modeling Analysis Sheet Use (two class periods)

  1. Discuss students' Reflection Journal entries from previous lesson. Clarify how primary sources differ from secondary sources. Note that informational articles often do not contain people's feelings about the experience.
  2. Explain the lesson's goal of learning critical thinking strategies to examine primary sources.
  3. Together, complete the Primary Source Analysis Tool to examine a photo of the disaster. Before the students begin, select questions from the teacher’s guide Analyzing Photographs and Prints to focus and prompt analysis and discussion.
  4. Next, examine an account from a witness to the event. Students analyze the oral history, recording their thoughts on the Primary Source Analysis Tool. Before the students begin, select questions from the teacher's guide Analyzing Oral Histories to focus and prompt analysis and discussion. (Note that oral histories are written in the narrator's own words and may reveal biases and prejudices which may seem inappropriate. They may also contain spelling errors or non-standard English.)
  5. Using a handout of the song lyrics, have students study the song, recording their thoughts on the Primary Source Analysis Tool. Before the students begin, select questions from the teacher’s guide Analyzing Sheet Music and Song Sheets to focus and prompt analysis and discussion.
  6. Compile and record information about the event using different colored markers for each source.

Activity Three: Guided Reading (two weeks)

  1. Help students select a book based on a natural disaster.
  2. Help students to establish a schedule to complete the reading of the book. Possible questions to focus student responses might include:
    • What were your feelings after reading the first chapter of the book? What gave you this impression?
    • What details did the author use to show the setting of the story and give you a sense of what the characters were like?
    • What were the main problems the characters faced in the story? How did they attempt to solve them?
    • What surprised or confused you in the book?
    • What was the passage that seemed most real to you?
    • What did the characters or their families, communities, or governments do to help people recover from the event?
    • What effects did the event have on the characters' lives and on their communities?
    • What lessons did you learn from the way people handled the event?
    • What questions would you like answered about the event?
    • What changes would you have made in the story?

Activity Four: Coaching Independent Research (four or five class periods)

  1. Using the reference materials available, have students compile information about the event from their novel. Possible questions to guide the research include:
    • Who was involved in the event?
    • When and where did the natural disaster take place?
    • What were things like before the event took place?
    • What seemed to have caused the event?
    • What happened during the event?
    • What were the effects of the event?
    • How did the people react to the event?
    • How did people recover from the disaster?
    • What changes were made or lessons were learned as a result of the event?
  2. Direct students to the the appropriate natural disaster from the Gallery of Artifacts.
  3. As students analyze the primary sources, have them record their thoughts on the Primary Source Analysis Tool. Before the students begin, select questions from the teacher’s guide Analyzing Primary Sources to focus the group work, and select additional questions to focus and prompt a whole class discussion of their analysis.
  4. Provide time for students to search additional Internet resources about the event and summarize their research.

Activity Five: Preparing the Wax Museum Presentation (four class periods)

  1. Review the elements of the wax museum presentations: Prepare a historical fiction account for your book based on the following outline. Your oral report is in a "wax museum" format and should be 3-5 minutes in length. Dress up like a person who witnessed the event in the book and describe the event as that person would.
    1. Introduction
      1. Use an interesting attention getter to introduce the subject of your presentation.
      2. Include the date and place of the event and explain why this event was important in American history.
    2. Body
      1. Tell the facts about when, where, why and how the event occurred.
      2. Use your photographs to explain more details about what happened before, during, and after the event.
      3. Describe how this event affected the people who experienced it. Use your artifacts to demonstrate your points.
      4. Explain how things changed as a result of this event.
      5. Tell how you felt as a witness to the event.
      6. Explain how the people recovered from this event. Present the lessons you learned from the people who experienced this event.
    3. Conclusion
      1. Wrap up the personal account.
      2. Include whether or not you think the event could ever happen again.
  2. Allow time for preparation and presentation.
  3. Rehearse oral presentations with partners.
  4. Optional: Send out invitations to parents, other classes, and community members.

Extension

Students may extend their experience by examining a recent natural disaster, locating and analyzing primary source documents related to it, and noting similarities and differences to those of earlier times. Students may also examine how the events are presented in children's books.

Lesson Evaluation

Students interpret and construct meaning from the photographs, song lyrics and life histories and apply the information by creating an original oral composition. They compare fictional and factual accounts of an event and learn independently as they research a natural disaster and its effects. Finally, students create a quality product synthesizing information and meaning from several sources.

Student products may include:

  1. A personal interpretation of photographs.
  2. An interpretation of song lyrics.
  3. An evaluation/analysis of an oral history.
  4. A journal with reactions to an historical fiction novel.
  5. A presentation including an original fictional eyewitness account of the event which demonstrates the ability to apply information gathered through research to a new composition.
  6. A poster with photographs, maps, diagrams, drawings or other information about the natural disaster.

Rubrics for these products should be designed in a teacher student collaboration. Students may also complete a self evaluation of their participation in the lesson.

Credits

Patricia Solfest & Kimberly Wardean