Natural Disasters

The news is a great way to bring forward some science topics.  It is amazing, we could be talking about hurricanes or earthquakes in class and it might be pulling teeth to get the students to talk about it.  Yet if we have a disaster like the recent earthquake in Japan, the students will be talking about it for days.  That is one way to get their attention.  They love to bring in tidbits of information that they learned on the news.  We recently had a speaker from The New Community Project http://www.newcommunityproject.org/ the students were enthralled by the stories that the speaker conveyed to them about the hardships that people go through, throughout the world.  The students genuinly wanted to help, so we collected aluminum cans and then turned the cans in for money to send to these causes.  It was a great way to bring these happenings into reality for my students.  I wonder if maybe once a 9 weeks the students would bring in current events of natural disasters and then as a class they could decided where they would want to send the aluminum can money.  Then if we could find a contact and maybe skype with students in that area that would make the experience that much more memorable.