What's the Plan, Stan? has suggestions for teaching and learning programmes for students in New Zealand primary schools, focusing on emergency events and the effects they could have on your community.
Below are some suggestions for effective ways to engage your students when learning about emergency preparedness.
Revisit information. Link new information to prior knowledge and learning. Understanding how the science of natural events links to the social impacts in your local area creates many opportunities to create learning pathways.
Use the news. Current events help students make connections to their learning, enhance the relevance of new learning, and taps into what students already know.
Find teachable moments. As part of your school’s emergency procedures, drills will take place at regular intervals. Use these to grab a teachable moment pulling information from the resource to reinforce the need for the drill and why drills happen.
Include all students. Carefully plan for the needs of all students in an emergency. Take a team approach and consult and plan with teacher aides and parents, as well as the children themselves and their peers.
Use experts. Every community has experts who can inspire your students’ thinking, provide information, and add emotional impact to local events. You can choose to invite experts to the classroom or to visit them at a geological site so that students are able to relate events to where they took place.
Use images. Photographs are a good way to introduce new topics and add to students’ knowledge about other people and places. They provide a prompt for students to share, discuss, and question their ideas.
Take action. As a conclusion to this knowledge gathering, students can take part in social action to show that they too can be prepared. This gives a greater depth and purpose to their learning and allows them to use new knowledge and skills and to explore these within a relevant context. Social action may include:
creating a school-wide event highlighting preparedness and emergency impacts
creating digital or written materials for increasing awareness among the wider community
taking action to increase awareness around preparedness and safety for vulnerable members of the community and pets.
The New Zealand Curriculum sets the direction for teaching and learning in schools, outlining the values, key competencies, and outcomes that your school must take into account when designing your curriculum; and the principles on which you will base your decisions. What’s the Plan, Stan? has been aligned to The New Zealand Curriculum as follows:
What's the Plan, Stan? aligns with The New Zealand Curriculum’s vision for young people being:
What's the Plan, Stan? encourages community and participation for the common good. It also promotes innovation, inquiry, and curiosity by encouraging critical, creative, and reflective thinking.
What's the Plan, Stan? is consistent with The New Zealand Curriculum’s principles of:
Links can be made between emergency preparedness education and all five of the key competencies. In particular, there is a strong link to managing self. What’s the Plan, Stan? provides authentic, wide ranging and increasingly complex contexts that students need in order to be challenged.
What's the Plan, Stan? can be taught in the context of a number of learning areas:
Health and Physical Education: Safety management. In particular the emphasis on healthy communities and environments:
Social Studies: Conceptual strands – Identity, culture and organisation; Continuity and change. Especially with reference to belonging to groups and taking on roles and responsibilities:
Science: Nature of science; Planet Earth and beyond. Especially the strand planet Earth and beyond, which has a natural fit with modules on disaster identification, preparedness, and recovery, specifically at Levels 1 and 2:
English: Listening, reading and viewing; Speaking, writing and presenting
Emergency preparedness education provides a context for an integrated learning approach across learning areas (mathematics and statistics, technology, the arts and learning languages) and is suitable for use in Learning Experiences Outside The Classroom (LEOTC).
What's the Plan, Stan? encourages community and participation to support better preparedness for emergencies. Schools are at the heart of the community and in some cases are Civil Defence Centres or Sector Posts. Focus your emergency preparedness and awareness on your school whānau and wider community.
Ask:
Encourage students and whānau to have conversations about:
As a school, you are in a good position to help facilitate community conversations about emergency events, preparedness and impacts. Some suggestions for ways to do this with your students are:
Learning is real for students when they can make connections to their own lives and experiences:
These events may be pertinent to your area because they have happened there before, or because the geological features of your local area make it possible that such an event could occur. This gives students a greater connection to local landmarks and encourages communities to prepare for the types of emergency events they are more likely to encounter.
Explore local volcanoes or rivers and use maps and photographs to identify the best places to go. You can draw on local knowledge and visit areas of interest with experts who know about them.
Students will be able to explore contexts that are relevant to their wider community. Your students can take on the task of helping to inform, advise and prepare the community outside their classroom door.
What's the Plan, Stan? learning experiences for years 1–3
This selection of suggested learning experiences, resources and examples for junior primary includes:
What's the Plan, Stan? learning experiences for years 4–8
This selection of suggested learning experiences, resources and examples to build on the junior primary understandings includes:
Emergencies can happen anywhere, any time, and without warning. When they do, Civil Defence and emergency services will be busy helping the people who need them most
If an emergency event happened now, would you be ready?
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