Natural Disaster Research Worksheet

Activity Overview

When studying natural disasters, it's important for students to connect the definitions to real-world events. This project will have them researching two different disasters, one minor and one major (such as a category 1 and category 5 hurricane) and examining if and how responses change based on the size of the disaster. Students shouldn't feel limited to recent disasters - in fact you can encourage them to look into the early 20th century for their projects.

Students can choose their own type of natural disaster, but the instructions on the worksheet are designed for students to draw their disaster type out of a bag or box so it's randomly assigned. This helps distribute types of disasters across the classroom and saves you from assigning students one to research. However, you can change the instructions on the worksheet prior to printing.

Clicking "Use This Assignment" will copy the worksheet into your teacher account. While you can choose to assign this to students on Storyboard That, the worksheet is made to be printed out! Feel free to edit any of it as desired to ask additional questions or provide different instructions. Once you've finished, save and print!