Teaching about the Haiti earthquake at The English Academy

[Boyd Roberts]

Lesson plan – Earthquake in Haiti

From Parag Patel, The English Academy, Kuwait.

As the commander of army and aid forces sent over on the first day of the emergency, how would you deal with the problems associated with disaster management?

We will read the story that summarises what happened on each day, and discuss what we would have done and see how close we were to the real thing. TEACHER NOTE: teacher should ask children to scroll down to bottom of the page and read up (day by day summary of what has been happening starts from bottom and goes up)

After reading the account of the first two days ask kids what they would do if they were the first on the scene, in terms of:

1) search and rescue – problems associated (and how it is done). (click on diagram on article for answers/what actually happened)

2) What can we do with survivors? (compare student responses with what was done)

3) What do we do with the fatalities?

4) What are the likely problems to arise next? How can we deal with this? (how are they dealing with looting etc etc.

Teacher link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8465266.stm

Write an evaluation/reflective piece to include in your portfolio about what you have learnt in this lesson.

I have used this plan and I hope it makes sense to everyone else. Our system allows the teacher to have control over the pupil screens so the teacher can project the article with no risk of the pupil reading further ahead to discover what happened in reality.