We have some great resources on LearningGrids to help children to understand and write about the causes and consequences of natural disasters such as avalanches, droughts, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, landslides, tornadoes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and wildfires.

Use our Natural Disasters Find Out and Write About Custom Sets to introduce information about these events. Children read about 10 types of natural disasters, and every reading page includes a link to a supported writing activity. Book 1, Book 2 and Book 3 have differentiated layouts and information, and support children with different reading and writing abilities. Direct your students to a book that is suitable to their level or encourage them to work through the books so that they build on their knowledge and extend their writing skills. 

We have also recently published a series of Clicker Board Mind Maps for each of the natural disasters. These can be used as a starting point to gauge the children’s prior knowledge, as a planning tool for writing, or as a wrap-up activity to collate the information they learned.

For a mini project, students can read about natural disasters in the Natural Disasters Books and then encourage them to research a real event, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, or the California wildfires, and complete a mind map about the causes and consequences they find. The Clicker Board can then be exported as a word bank and used to support the writing of a newspaper article, chronological recount, or a fact file about the natural disaster they studied.

For more resources to support speaking and writing about natural disasters, visit our Natural Disasters category on LearningGrids.