I Survived The Joplin Tornado, 2011
For our fourth "I Survived" book club meeting we talked about the Joplin Tornado. This program was broken down into 3 parts: Book discussion, snacks and an activity.
Discussion
Discussion
Of all the discussions we've had this was the most involved. Our library isn't located in Tornado Alley, but tornadoes aren't all that uncommon where we live so most of the group were familiar with these storms.
As always, at the beginning of our discussion we each picked a favorite part of the book and shared it with the group. Other topics points we hit were how tornadoes form, their features, the destruction
they cause and tornado safety. Aside from general tornadoes, of course we talked about the Joplin tornado.
One of the grandmothers in our group even had a boss who had grown up in Joplin and she shared a bit of his family's experience!
If you remember from the story, Dex's parents were at a graduation for the local high school students when the tornado hit. The graduation wasn't held at the high school but instead at the Leggett and Platt arena on Missouri Southern State University campus and was actually used as an emergency shelter in real life. For some reason, the minor fact involving Dex's parents to have foundations in truth caught my attention. From Graduation to Terror and JHS Class of 2011 Reflects On Graduation, Future were two memorable articles I read.
Emergency Kit Relay Activity
Instead of a craft (and because the only good themed craft I could find was Tornado in a Bottle, which I did NOT want to do) we played a relay game!
Emergency Kits are so important to have and in this game, teams are building their own kits to prepare themselves against future disasters in a relay style game.
During our discussion we made sure to talk about Emergency Kits briefly!
Cards with images representing various items were printed off and spread across a table face up. Most of the items were very useful to a traumatic event and some of them weren't.
HOW TO PLAY
As always, at the beginning of our discussion we each picked a favorite part of the book and shared it with the group. Other topics points we hit were how tornadoes form, their features, the destruction
One of the grandmothers in our group even had a boss who had grown up in Joplin and she shared a bit of his family's experience!
If you remember from the story, Dex's parents were at a graduation for the local high school students when the tornado hit. The graduation wasn't held at the high school but instead at the Leggett and Platt arena on Missouri Southern State University campus and was actually used as an emergency shelter in real life. For some reason, the minor fact involving Dex's parents to have foundations in truth caught my attention. From Graduation to Terror and JHS Class of 2011 Reflects On Graduation, Future were two memorable articles I read.
Emergency Kit Relay Activity
Instead of a craft (and because the only good themed craft I could find was Tornado in a Bottle, which I did NOT want to do) we played a relay game!
During our discussion we made sure to talk about Emergency Kits briefly!
Cards with images representing various items were printed off and spread across a table face up. Most of the items were very useful to a traumatic event and some of them weren't.
HOW TO PLAY
Divide into 2 or 3 teams - we did Boys vs Girls with about 7 on each team.
The way our room was set up was we had a table on one end where all the Item Cards were spread out face up and players stood at the other end of the room.
Each team had to stand single file behind a chair which marked as their boundary limit. No one could go past that chair until a member of their team had returned with an Item Card. Teams placed their Item Card on the seat of the chair once they came back.
This continued on relay-style until all the Item Cards were chosen.
Each item had been given a point value so to choose the winning team, groups tallied up their score while I gave each point value out loud.
Here's a link to the Item Cards and the Point Value Sheet I made. Feel free to use them! The pictures for the Item Cards are straight off Google Images so one or two have watermarks... 😣
Graph Map Activity
This is an activity that we didn't have time to do but I'll share it with you anyway! This activity is about reaching safety using an X,Y grid and directions.
In the Lauren Tarshis's books, having a sense of direction is very crucial to survival. In I Survived: The Joplin Tornado, Dex has to find his way from Peter's Garage to his home. That would be HARD when all the landmarks you've ever known were gone.
One of the themes of this series is getting away from danger and in an emergency, we might have to rely on how to read a map to get us out of a dangerous situation.
This Graph Map Activity was inspired by the Disaster Route Lesson on Stem Read which is a very handy little website.
In this activity we would discuss cardinal direction, compass rose and use directions to travel across an X,Y grid to safety.
Because this map had schools distinctively marked on the map, those were able to be transferred onto our Map Activity Sheet.
My goal was, using the graph map to travel from one of the schools in the tornado's path to the safe school. The thought was we could do one as a group and then form teams of two and each person could take turns giving each other directions.
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