Timely resources for hurricane season

With hurricane coverage dominating the news, September is an excellent time to take advantage of students’ curiosity about this powerful natural phenomenon. LEARN NC features a variety of resources — from our own site and around the web — to support your instruction.  Here are some highlights:

• Nature’s Fury: Hurricanes, from National Geographic, explains the science behind hurricanes through text, images, and video.
• Graveyard of the Atlantic, from LEARN NC’s North Carolina Digital History Textbook and The Hurricane of ’38, from PBS, provide a historical perspective on how hurricanes have affected Americans.
• The lesson plans Coastal Weather Issues: Planning for a Hurricane and Hurricane Response: What Do We Do First? ask students to take on the roles of emergency management team members and community leaders and create a plan of action for their community as it faces the threat of a hurricane.
• Hurricanes on Sandy Shorelines is a virtual field trip to the North Carolina beaches in which students explore hurricane formation and how hurricanes affect the sand sharing system on North Carolina’s barrier islands.

In addition, our North Carolina Digital History Textbook devotes an entire chapter to Hurricane Floyd, which devastated North Carolina’s coast in 1999. The chapter’s fourteen pages address the issue of hurricanes from multiple perspectives, including:

• scientific topics such as How does a hurricane form?
• geographical information such as Mapping rainfall and flooding
• economic concerns such as Floyd and agriculture
• social issues such as The problems of flood relief

Check out this guide for more of our best resources for teaching about hurricanes. You can also browse all of our hurricane-related content to find relevant images, slide shows, videos, and lesson plans.