" The pain is distant to us, but here it is seething"

Categories: s1 and s2, Environmental Hazards, Rural Land Resources, Geography General
Sometimes when teaching earth forces, I feel as though I skim over the real human tragedy involved in these natural events. It's a topic with great opportunities for interaction and exploration, and I was hoping to do a group activity on earthquake proof buildings using coffee stirrers and marshmallows. While I'm sure students will enjoy doing this, I didn't want the idea to be lost that people are trying to design these buildings for a very real purpose. So, on Tuesday, I'm going to use this clip below from youtube, a news report on the Sichuan Earthquake



I'll then talk about the earthquake damage-the school is a good point to stop the clip and see the effect of the quake on the buildings. I don't want to give too much away about earthquake proofing, but I'll maybe then use some images as a starter-which building would be most likely to survive a quake and why? There's also the New Bay Bridge site as a whiteboard activity for individuals/ groups, and another flash animation about foundations which could be used. I'm also looking forward to hearing and seeing the results of the random individual homework tasks decided by the random name generator on classtools!
I did something similar with s1, and we'll look at some of the results before touring the continents on Google Earth and asking what links the individual places to Brazil. I've got a pretty standard period with Higher, looking at The Dales, but that's OK, as I'm still converting the various mobile files from Wednesday. Perhaps a variation on the wordmat with a wordle would work here?