The Ready Classroom

The Ready Classroom

The Ready Classroom is a great resource for teachers to use with their classrooms. Although it has been specifically written for schools in the USA all of the content is appropriate to schools everywhere.

This resource is to prepare schools, students and families in the case of a disaster.

Disasters that are dealt with on the site are:

• Earthquakes
• Extreme heat
• Floods
• Hurricanes
• Landslide and debris flow
• Thunderstorms
• Tornadoes
• Tsunamis
• Volcanoes
• Wildfires
• Winter storms and extreme cold

There are also links to appropriate videos which open in a new window. These vary in length and have been graded as to what is appropriate for different class levels.

My city has been through two major earthquakes over this past year. Naturally I therefore had a look through the area about earthquakes. In here is an explanation of what an earthquake is, a checklist to download and all the videos about earthquakes. While the checklist is good it does not deal at all with liquefaction which we found a real problem. At the time of the earthquake many cars got stranded in deep sink holes.

There are teacher tools including lesson plans, themed puzzles and resources. In addition children can make a family plan for emergencies. This is online and is not saved but may be printed out and some parts may be downloaded and saved. This would be well worth doing with students.

The Ready Classroom is part of the Discovery Education web site.