Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes	Part A: How prepared are you?
20 minutes	Part B: Protection versus prevention
40 minutes	Part C: Community Communication
05 minutes	Reflection

Part A: How prepared are you?

Step 1.

Present students with a hypothetical situation: a fire is threatening their community. What would be at risk from this bushfire?

Create a list on the whiteboard.

Students might focus on the micro (a basketball trophy, family photos, the pet dog) but you should also encourage them to look at the macro (the family home, the farm, potentially important community buildings or places such as shops, playgrounds, hospitals, etc.).

While this lesson focuses on bushfires, you can easily adapt the following activities to consider floods or other natural disasters common in your local area.

Step 2.

Ask students to identify how many of the threatened things are likely to be saved.

You might be able to evacuate, in which case, what could you grab in under 5 minutes? What might you have to leave behind? What if the dog didn’t want to be caught? Would you be able to decide what was most important to save in that time?

What could you grab if you had an hour to prepare? You might pack a suitcase or an evacuation pack with all your important documents.

However, your house might still be threatened by the bushfire and damaged, or even destroyed.

What if you had a year to prepare? Students might be able to come up with elaborate firefighting systems to protect their house.

Step 3.

What do students understand from this hypothetical?

Lead them to the idea that being prepared and seeking to prevent and protect ourselves from disasters in advance has much better outcomes than trying to cope with or escape disasters in the moment they are upon us.

Part B: Protection versus prevention

Step 1.

Ask students what the difference between protection and prevention is.

Some examples might be:

Protection: the act of shielding from harm
Prevention: to keep from happening or existing

Step 2.

Introduce students to the idea that we can plan our year around natural disaster seasons. What can we do long before bushfire season to help ensure that our loved ones, our houses, and our community are at less risk of experiencing danger, loss and devastation from being ill-prepared?

Reinforce the point that if we remain vigilant and prepare for the worst-case scenario, we can often prevent the most devastating consequences of disasters, or at least somewhat protect against them.

The most effective means of prevention and protection are maintained and practised over time.

Step 3.

Watch:

Bush Fire Fact - Don't give fire a chance (youtube.com/watch?v=KU8BM_sE-uM)

Step 4.

Independently, students look through the Bushfire-Resilient Homes Toolkit Resident’s Guide. This guide contains a number of suggestions to prepare homes for disaster, and actions they can take to protect their house and prevent major damage.

Students should take notes as they work through the resource.

Provisions for learning support

You might like to have students work in groups and focus on a particular page of the resource. Students can then report back to the class or each other to gain a wider understanding.

Some of these protective measures are understandably beyond students, as they require deep structural changes to be made to houses. However, they are still valuable ideas.

Step 5.

As a class or in small groups, brainstorm some more ways of protecting your house from disasters.

For example, students might clear their gutters of leaves and prepare fire breaks around their property by (legally) clearing scrub and trees.

Step 6.

Give students an opportunity to independently investigate more strategies at https://knowledge.aidr.org.au/resources/emergency-planning-tools/

Part C: Community communication

Step 1.

Students are now tasked with communicating their knowledge to their community in order to keep their town and friends equally as safe.

First, students work independently or in groups to create a rough calendar of events that will help communities respond more effectively to the threat of natural disasters.

Of the jobs they have identified in Part B, students should consider whether they need to be done at certain intervals throughout the year, or even multiple times.

An example calendar can be found on the Student Worksheet.

The colours denote when fires are most likely to threaten communities, but you might like to challenge students to identify the periods when there is more and less risk of bushfire and other natural disaster events, and colour the chart themselves.

Step 2.

Students will create public service announcements to inform and encourage the community to take preventative measures.

The purpose of the communication piece should be to upskill and inform their community about actions they can take within the community and around their own homes in preparation for bushfire or other natural disaster events.

Students could create a video or public service announcement to be broadcast over the radio, or they could create a poster or checklist using the art supplies, or a program such as Canva.

Students may want to think about how best to present information in a quick and clear way.

The animation from earlier may give students inspiration on style (cartoon, colour, etc.) and how to present information in an easy way.

Or look at Country Fire Service, South Australia have made for inspiration:

You can download this image here.

Reflection

Students do a gallery walk with post-its. They write what they like about other students’ work and what might be improved.

Teachers may continue with this project and implement a lesson where the students’ posters are refined and polished by incorporating this feedback in another lesson.

Differentiated Learning

Part A

Students have the option to simply list what is at risk when fires threaten communities.

Part B

Students might like to focus on a smaller role. For example: what should be included in the emergency box? It might be more accessible for some students to think in a more focused, practical way.

Part C

Rather than modifying this task, students should work in groups. These groups should be organised so peers can help one another. One student may take charge of using Canva, while another student may take the role of arranging the layout. Teacher discretion is to be used when organising groups.

Reflection

Students could look at the projects and select which one/s they like most. They could communicate to their teacher why they chose a particular project over others.

Teacher reflection

Take this opportunity to reflect on your own teaching

What did you learn about your teaching today?
What worked well?
What didn’t work so well?
What would you share?
Where to next?
How are you going to get there?

Resilient Australia - Preparing the community for disaster resilience

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