Natural Hazards, Grade 2: STEM Road Map for Elementary School

What if you could challenge your second graders to help communities prepare for disasters ranging from floods and wildfires to earthquakes and hurricanes? With this volume in the STEM Road Map Curriculum Series, you can!

Natural Hazards outlines a journey that will steer your students toward authentic problem solving while grounding them in integrated STEM disciplines. Like the other volumes in the series, this book is designed to meet the growing need to infuse real-world learning into K-12 classrooms.

This interdisciplinary module uses project- and problem-based learning to help young children explore cause and effect. Working in teams, your second graders will draw on science, English language arts, mathematics, social studies, and the engineering design process to do the following:

Identify various natural hazards, their basic causes, and how they affect people, animals, and communities. Model natural hazards. Identify features of structures designed to withstand earthquakes and then construct models of those structures. Learn about predicting weather, including measuring, calculating, and evaluating numbers involved in probabilities. Create their own Weather Tall Tales.
Identify ways that people and communities can prepare for natural hazards and then communicate about the hazards to a target audience.

The STEM Road Map Curriculum Series is anchored in the Next Generation Science Standards, the Common Core State Standards, and the Framework for 21st Century Learning. In-depth and flexible, Natural Harzards can be used as a whole unit or in part to meet the needs of districts, schools, and teachers who are charting a course toward an integrated STEM approach.