The Day the Earth Shook, a classroom activity design challenges to explore structural engineering, from WGBH and NOVA.
To start your instruction in earthquakes, this is where you should head first. Download and print this teachers' guide packed with instructional activities, lessons, and information from FEMA . For grades 1-6. You won't believe the information you will find and use here!
Do you need help teaching liquefaction? Head here for additional information.
Questions and answers: Everything you or your students have ever wondered about earthquakes.
Musical Plates – In this multidisciplinary project, elementary grade students can learn about earthquakes through activities that use real time earthquake data as well as language art activities that look at how earthquakes affect our lives. There is also a teacher's area to assist educators in implementing this project in their classroom. (Spanish Version)
Earthquakes 101
This Dynamic Planet: A Teaching Companion is a teachers' site created by the USGS specifically to help teachers with earth sciences and related topics. Fabulous graphic displays that you will want to use and share with your students.
Earthquake 101 – Short video about earthquakes in general. Very good presentation with wonderful images and science details. Teacher warning: short commercial precedes the actual video.
Also from USGS – animations to teach all of those tricky earthquake concepts such as liquefaction, divergent boundaries and more.
Candy Quakes – Using a candy bar, gum, and Twizzlers, students will demonstrate the effects of deformational forces on the earth's crust. (8th Grade level)
Animated Earthquakes
Understanding P-waves and S-waves is helpful to the understanding of how earthquakes cause so much damage and destruction. For help in teaching about waves, you might want to visit here.
Here is a great animation of the 1964 Alaskan earthquake. It registered 9.4 on the Richter Scale. See how the waves create new shocks and tremors as they move across the surface of the earth.
