Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

20 minutes	Part A: People affected by natural hazards
45 minutes	Part B: Portrait
05 minutes	Reflection

Part A: People affected by natural hazards

Step 1.

Explain to students that today they will investigate real case scenarios about how people were affected by fires and floods.

Step 2.

Present the PowerPoint slides: A Portrait Of A Natural Hazard Survivor and discuss the following after reading through the case scenario and watching a short excerpt from A Fire Inside. You can revisit the slides from lesson 1 to show students examples of artworks that depict natural hazards. However, in the case of this lesson, students will be creating a portrait and considering its effects on the individual.

Note: The information in the article and clip from A Fire Inside could be emotional and trigger past trauma. Ensure you provide students with the opportunity to reflect and debrief.

Part B: Portrait

Step 1.

Ask students to gather their materials, consider the effects of natural hazards and create a portrait that defines how someone was affected by the hazard during (response) or afterwards (recovery).

Step 2.

While students are working, roam the class and ask students prompting questions or statements such as:

I am interested to see how you're progressing. Would you like to tell me a little about your process or artwork?
That is an interesting choice of colour or technique; how did you choose those colours or strokes?

Step 3.

Ask students to pause to take 5 minutes to walk around the classroom and look at how their peers have progressed with their work.

Step 4.

Ask them to return to their work and give them 15 minutes to complete their artwork.

Step 5.

Invite students to paste or add their artwork to their art book or folio and answer the question below:

How did creating the artwork improve your understanding of the effects of natural hazards?
Discuss your character and the effects of the natural hazard on that person’s life.
How are the character’s facial expressions or body language portrayed in the artwork you created?

Reflection

Ask your students to reflect and write down a response to the following prompts in the art folios:

How did your artwork capture the natural hazard's effects on the person or community's life?
How did creating the artwork improve your understanding of the effects of natural hazards?

Differentiated learning

Extension

Ask students to create a background to compliment their portrait or elaborate on the artwork's meaning. Such as writing an artist statement.

Provisional learning support

Students may need assistance to answer the questions. You may like to split students into groups to discuss the questions first and then allow them to write their responses.

Teacher reflection

Take this opportunity to reflect on your own teaching:

What did you learn about your teaching practice today?
What worked well?
What didn't work so well?
What would you share?
Where to next?
How are you going to get there?

Resilient Australia - Portrait Of A Bushfire Survivor

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Summary

Lesson guides and printables

In this lesson