Fire Fighter - Fun Activities - Community and Health

Community and Health - FIRE FIGHTER

Find a Word

Primary

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Literacy

Teacher

1. Click on the Fire Extinguisher and print off the "Find a word" and get the students to complete the puzzle

A Fire Survival Kit - A Fire Safety Budgeting Unit.
[Submitted by Jessie Callan when she was an ACU Education Student]

Primary [Created for students in Year 4 but could be adapted to Year 6]

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Numeracy

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Literacy

Cooperative Learning Activity

Home under threat from fire
(Source: Melbourne University - Bushfire Preparedness)

Teacher

This is a Rich Task challenging students to design a survival pack for families whose homes are under threat from fires. They are to decide which items to take with them according to a limited budget.

Teachers, you are to decide what budget (within the handouts) is allocated to which team of students. These budgets range from simple to complex.

Lesson Plan: Local Copy: For the Full Unit [.zip] - Lesson Plans, Unit Overview, Handouts, PPTs, and Assessment, click here.

Caution. Do not use this activity where fires have devastated communities.

Duration: 6 - 8 Lessons.

Resources

Introduction from a BTN video
https://youtu.be/sRdY3xhr2wc

Scenario for Students:

"You are a team of volunteers designing survival packs for families whose homes are under threat from the fires.

You will be using a budget, allocated to your team, to create a survival pack. All items selected must fit inside a 2x1m trailer.

Each family, which your team is assigned to, lives in a different area and has their own needs.

You will need to be creative and show critical thinking (and your budgeting skills) to determine which items will best support your family."

Statistics and Fire Fighters

Middle Secondary

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Numeracy

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Literacy

Cooperative Learning Activity

Investigate

1. In groups of 4 - 5 students, investigate the following websites [at the end] by dividing up the reading.

2. Discuss

As a group, using the photos and information contained in the websites [below] as stimulus, discuss possible considerations a firefighter needs to include to contain a bushfire (e.g. location, climate, wind direction and speed, forecasts, etc).

3. Research an Australian bushfire and create an information sheet including the discussed considerations. As a fire fighter, what advice would you give local citizens at this time to stay safe?

4. Create a table of statistics about Australian Bushfires from the information in the resources below.

5. Create a Poster showing these significant statistics to educate people about Australian bushfires.

6. As a class, share the posters each group has created.

Reading

Sydney Morning Herald 26 November 2021	News: South Australian bushfires: More than ...5 January 2015
Geoscience Australia - Bushfires	Statista: Bushfires in Australia
Australian Geographic

Public Service Announcement: Indigenous innovation could save billion tonnes of greenhouse gases

Secondary

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Literacy

Australian Curriculum General Capability: ICT Capability

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Critical and creative thinking

Australian Curriculum Cross Curriculum Priorities: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures

Australian Curriculum Cross Curriculum Priorities: Sustainability Priority

Cooperative Learning Activity

1. In groups of 4 - 5 students, share read the following article from The Conversation 22 April 2016 Reading

2. "Wildfire and climate change"

Fire-dependent ecosystems, such as tropical dry forests and savannas, cover around one-sixth of the global land surface. Indigenous people occupy most of these landscapes.

A major problem in all these landscapes is poor fire management. Large destructive fires are prevalent as a result. Many of these fire-dependent landscapes are closely linked with tropical rainforests, so poor fire regimes in savannas can have a significant impact on these forests as well.

In Australia, research has shown that burning the savanna in the early dry season rather than late can reduce emissions by as much as half. This is in line with Indigenous fire practices.

Through the Australian government’s Emissions Reduction Fund (under which savanna burning can earn credits), Australia is leading the world in reintroducing traditional fire practices.

The first project to use these practices to generate carbon credits was the Western Arnhem Land Fire Agreement (WALFA), which started in 2006. A decade later, the Clean Energy Regulator (which manages the Emissions Reduction Fund) has approved 65 projects.

More than 30 of these now have contracts with the regulator for over 7 million tonnes of carbon worth more than A$90 million. Fourteen are either Indigenous-owned or have significant Indigenous involvement.

These projects have also created jobs in remote and vulnerable communities, improved biodiversity, reinvigorated Indigenous culture and improved food security and health by enabling people to move out of dysfunctional urban life back to country. These projects represent a rapidly developing business that will play an increasingly important role in climate change policies...

While other countries have reintroduced traditional fire management, none measure the emissions reductions as Australia does.

Fire Management
Warddeken Land Management

Looking ahead

The next few years will significantly shape the prospects for these traditional fire management projects.

Australia’s climate change policies are set for comprehensive review in 2017, and climate change will be a key issue in the next federal election. The Paris Agreement provides important opportunities for land use management and carbon trading, which this Australian innovation can make an important contribution to achieving.

Traditional fire management represents a major “new” method of land use to mitigate climate change. As with REDD+, reaching its full potential will take decades and billions of dollars.

The next step is to develop a series of pilot sites in other countries. This should be accompanied by regional and international activities to develop the necessary monitoring, reporting and verification procedures along with providing awareness and policymaking support and working closely with relevant organisations.

Promoting this innovative Australian approach, which combines fire management, carbon abatement and Indigenous empowerment, represents a winning combination for global export, while matching existing government policies at all levels.

Support for the next phase of savanna fire management will therefore provide an interesting test of the government’s commitments to play a serious and constructive role in addressing climate change and to support innovation."

Investigate

3. As a group, you are to investigate the following websites: Reading

Creative Spirits: Aboriginal Fire Management	WA - Parks and Wildlife - Traditional Aboriginal burning
SBS: What role for Indigenous methods of fire management? Audio file	Indigenous Fire Management - Kimberley Land Council

Professor Rebecca Bird from Stanford University states..."Often it's very difficult for people to accept, especially the role that fire plays in the environment. When we're out on the Canning Stock Route with Aboriginal people, you go and you visit a well and tourists have recorded in the little visitors' booklet that the wells, how upset they are that the country is burnt, how ugly fire is and how horrible it is that things have completely devastated and in that same entry, like six months later, you scroll down and look at the comments that other people are leaving and they're talking about how beautiful the country is. Look at all the wildflowers, look at how gorgeous everything is. Well it's only that beautiful because people have been out there burning and the fire has happened. It's just a way of looking at the landscape that sees fire as something that's cleansing and that a burned area is something that's good and clean will eventually produce all of this gorgeous stuff that it just takes a complete switch of your mindset."

4. As a group, you are to set about convincing...

To do this, you are to create a Public Service Announcement to change the mindset of people about Traditional Aboriginal Fire Management methods and to promote saving billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases.

5. Plan your PSA by following the process in the following video: How to Make a PSA
https://youtu.be/qEMkjrZnd9M

6. Reflection

Reflection.

Share with the rest of the class. Who developed the strongest PSA? What made this particular PSA so meaningful?

Rescue Rover [from Try Engineering.org]

Primary Middle Secondary

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Critical and creative thinking
Australian Curriculum General Capability: Personal and social capability

Cooperative Learning Activity

This lesson focuses on the tools and equipment used during technical rescue operations.Teams of students construct a device out of everyday materials to rescue a puppy from a well.