Community resilience resources for schools

Want to find out how to prepare for emergencies and keep yourself and other safe? Keep reading and find out how this key message can be used as an exciting approach to teaching and learning.

Download this flyer for exciting ways to integrate flooding, severe weather and other resilience issues into CfE.

Read these case studies to see what this looks like in practice.

See at a glance how you can take this forward in the classroom:

Health and Wellbeing – responsibility of all

Are you ready for severe weather, utility failure, flooding or pandemics? Make sure you know what to do.  Stay informed, pack a kit, make a plan.

Literacy

Our climate is changing and communities across Scotland are becoming increasingly affected by extreme weather events and flooding which can block roads, destroy homes and lead to loss of power for thousands of people. This can be used as an exciting context for:

• report writing on the impact of severe weather on daily life in Scotland
• talk/presentation at assembly and to the whole class
• debating local issues like flood protection schemes and staying safe in emergencies
• creating new written texts like an information leaflet or a safety brochure.

Social studies/geography

Are you doing work around natural disasters, weather, land use, map work?

Use community resilience as an exciting approach to cover these topics. By working with local authority resilience professionals you could gain access to information about flood plains, flood protection schemes and other areas of interest in the local area. Local authorities can share data and images from sensors, such as from traffic monitoring, to bring the learning to life in the classroom.  Contact your local authority to discover what may be available to help your school learn about community resilience.

Science

Scotland’s climate is changing as a result of climate change, so we are getting colder and wetter winters and hotter and wetter summers. Use community resilience as an exciting context to explore these issues.

• explain some of the processes which contribute to climate change
• consider how climate change influences changes in the atmosphere and then how this impacts on living things
• investigate how severe weather can affect daily life in short, medium and long term, considering impact on social, economic and cultural life
• create and use rain gauges as part of a project monitoring and analysing the weather in the local area
• create anemometers to measure wind speed.

Technology

Use community resilience as an exciting context to:

• design rain gardens, green roofs, identify ways to harvest rainwater
• identify the impact, contribution, and relationship of technologies on the environment through flood protection schemes
• design and construct models to illustrate how sustainable urban drainage systems work
• explore uses of materials
• create and present weather forecasts based on personal research
• investigate the impact of severe weather on people, place and the economy, on a local, national or international level.

 Numeracy and mathematics

Community resilience can be used as an exciting context to solve problems using a range of methods, sharing approaches and solutions with others e.g. money, measurement, data and analysis, chance and uncertainty:

• use digital mapping and other information sources to work out how much salt is required to help clear a surface covered with snow
• compare and contrast the contracts and cost plans offered by a range of utility companies, and consider how this may be affected by an emergency
• use outcomes linked to chance and uncertainty to consider the likelihood of another utilities failure happening
• consider how this may affect insurance premiums.