Natural Disasters Worksheets and Hands-On Activity Ideas

Our Natural Disasters Packet has notebook pages and worksheets as well as some hands-on activity ideas covering the following events:

• Flooding
• Mudslides
• Tsunami
• Tornado
• Hurricane, cyclone, typhoon
• Blizzard
• Heat Wave
• Drought
• Wildfire
• Sinkholes

In this packet you’ll find one page on each of these events. Often, natural disasters occur because of geologic changes or extreme weather conditions. Students explore the cause of each of these events.  They also find out what  damage results and examines the effect these disasters have on people, property, and infrastructure. Students fill in their own information about each natural disaster, what causes it, and give an example of a recent event and what effect it had on the community.

A number of years ago, we did some fun hands-on activities to help the kids understand what natural disasters are and why they can be so devastating.  These activities are buried deep in our blog, though, and I thought I would share some of them with you again today! They are also in the Natural Disasters Packet above.

These are activities we did when the kids were about PreK and early elementary:

 Mudslide: We mixed sand and cornstarch and covered a butter container container. Then we made it “rain” for a period of time to see what happened!

Hurricane Activity: The kids built paper houses out of index cards and tape.  We took a straw to show what effect wind would have on our house.  It fell down. So, then I let the kids reinforce their house with MORE tape!  The second time round, the house withstood 1 straw. So then we added a second straw and tried again.  The houses fell down and couldn’t withstand the stronger winds.

At the time, we watched the National Geographic you-tube video on hurricanes:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9VpwmtnOZc

Tsunami Activity:  The kids recreated a tsunami.  In a flat class pan, the kids built a sandy beach (with sand and corn flour).  They also made some index card houses.  I first had them try hitting the picnic table with a bat, but that didn’t create strong enough waves. So then, I had LD give the table a good shake a couple of times.  With that, the tsunami struck full force!

Tsunamis are generally caused by an underwater earthquake, landslide, or volcanic eruption.

Natural Disasters Lapbook: You can use the interactive notebook pieces provided in this packet to create your own lapbook.

There are a couple of natural disaster worksheets as well (one is a matching page, the other is blank so the kids can write in the answer):

We watched Raging Planet (affiliate link) along with this unit. My kids really enjoyed this documentary.  Disc 1 covered lightning, tornado, floods, hurricanes. Disc 2 covered avalanche, volcano, sea storms, blizzards.

Here’s Amazon’s description: revealing the speed of a twister, the power of a hurricane, the lethal force of a lightning bolt, the instant devastation of a flood, or the explosive punch of a volcano. Feel what it’s like to be inside a house when a storm rips the roof off, when a cloud of volcanic ash overtakes you, or what a street sign picked up by a tornado would do to your car window. This is Nature at it s wildest and most furious.

Recently, I added in some new interactive notebook pages and blank notebook pages. My kids are actually using these for their foreign language practice (writing sentences to describe the pictures).  🙂  Hope it’s helpful for you too!

This packet now comes with our Clouds, Winds & Weather Packet. See more details about that here.

You can download the Natural Disasters Unit AND Clouds, Winds & Weather Packet with the link below. Hope it’s helpful!

Don’t forget to check your PayPal email address for the download link!

Feel free to email me if you have any questions! ~Liesl

$5.99 Clouds, Winds & Weather Packet AND the Natural Disasters Packet  visit post, image 1, image 2, image 3, image 4

Floods, mudslides, tsunami, hurricanes, blizzards, drought, wildfires – This packet does not cover earthquakes, volcanoes, plate movement or the ring of fire because we covered that in great detail in our Earth Science Packet. More details of the Natural Disaster Packet here. image 1, image 2

You may be interested in some of these related packets:

$9.99 Earth Science Unit (175+ pages) – Quick Preview or Visit Post for more details.  See the Earth Science BUNDLE options here.

$6.99 Layers of the Atmosphere Unit (50+ pages) – Quick Preview  or Visit Post or view image to enlarge. See Earth Science BUNDLE options in Our Store.

See the Earth Science BUNDLE Options here.

$7.99 Rocks and Minerals Unit 100+ pages

Don’t forget to check your PayPal email account for your download link! If you have any questions or problems feel free to email me or check out the FAQ.

$4.50 Where I Live Activity Packet – My galaxy, solar system, planet, continent, country, state, town, and home! Note: This packet has versions for students living in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia and New Zealand. – Quick Preview or visit post or view image

$5.99  Magnetism Packet: Magnets, Magnetic Fields, the Magnetosphere and Animal Migration Quick Preview or Visit Post or View image

Here is more about our Earth Science Unit!

This 100+ page Earth Science Packet (now well over 100 pages actually because we recently added new materials on plate tectonics and more!) includes worksheets about the solar system, the layers of the Earth, plate tectonics, the ring of fire, earthquake activity and volcanoes. I also included instructions for more than a dozen hands-on activities we did with this unit. This includes activities about plate tectonics, Pangaea, using a compass, earthquakes, volcanoes,  instructions on how to make a shake table and more!

You may be interested in some of our related packets:

Earth Science Unit: In this unit, we talked about the layers of the Earth, latitude & longitude, tectonic plate movement (and did a couple of great hands-on activities related to that), earthquakes (we made an earthquake shake table), mountain making, volcanoes (we did a couple of fun hands-on activities) and more

Layers of the Atmosphere Packet & Hands-On Activities

You might also be interested in our Place Value Materials and Pirate Math Packet. This post also has a video that explains how we did our place value activities.

See you again soon here or over at our Homeschool Den Facebook Page! Don’t forget to Subscribe to our Homeschool Den Newsletter. You might also want to check out some of our resources pages above (such as our Science, Language Arts, or History Units Resource Pages) which have links to dozens of posts.  You might want to join our free Homeschool Den Chat Facebook group.  Don’t forget to check out Our Store as well.

Happy Homeschooling, everyone!!  ~Liesl

---

P.S. You might be interested in these free Homeschool Resource Guides:

Creating Your Own Homeschool Curriculum: These are some resources I made that might be helpful as you create your own homeschool plans.  These are somewhere between 30 and 50 pages and are FREE to download:

• Creating a Homeschool Curriculum: Kindergarten – Grade 1

• Creating Your Homeschool Curriculum: Grades 2-3, Resource Guide

• Creating Your Homeschool Curriculum Grade 4-5 — Free Resource Guide

• Creating a Homeschool Curriculum for Grades 6-8 – Free Resource Guide

You might also be interested in these resource pages here on the blog:

• Science Units: We absolutely ♥ love hands-on science activities. We do a lot of science experiments as we do our science units.  You might find something useful here:

• History Units

• Language Arts — We have tons of free grammar pages on things like comma rules, their/they’re/there and more.

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links in this post are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase.