To be able to ask for help, ask for items or to borrow items, express needs and guess needs.

Introduce the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #3: Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages. See the link between how preparing a survival backpack can help meet this goal.

Prepare, in advance, a list of items that you’d find in a survival backpack for each student. If you have time, print and cut out images of the items, which will help children identify them. In some students’ lists omit items and in others’ lists write more than one item of the items you omitted.

Find a success story online of a child who evacuated due to a forest fire or flood in the region this past year.

Prepare images on slides of 1) a child with a pounding heart 2) an adult asking a child to come with them that the child doesn’t want to follow and 3) the child friend of a child who is crying. On the first slide write the phrase “I need help”. On the second slide write the phrases “no, thank you” and “my friend is waiting for me”. On the third slide write the phrases “are you really scared?” and “what are you needing?”.

Introduce the role-play scenario of them being asked to evacuate to an English-speaking community due to rising water levels or smoke from a nearby forest fire. Introduce the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #3 of Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages. Explain how preparing a survival backpack can help meet this goal.

Share a success story of a child who evacuated due to a forest fire in the region this past summer and share that with your class to inspire hope.

Go through the full list of items with pictures explaining the words in French and what they mean in English first to the class. Ask them to repeat after you. Then introduce and explain the phrases “Do you have (x item)?” and “Can I borrow (y item)?”, asking them to repeat after you. Distribute the lists to each student and invite students to then find a classmate with the item(s) they’re missing on their respective lists using the phrases they learned. Ask them to pretend not to speak French if spoken to in French. Ask students to cross out items they’ve lended.

As a group, introduce 2-3 scenarios using images on slides of 1) a child with a pounding heart 2) an adult asking a child to come with them that the child doesn’t want to follow and 3) the child friend of a child who is crying. For the first slide introduce a short deep breathing exercise and the phrase “I need help”. Explain the scenario and how the breathing exercise and the phrase can be used. Ask everyone to try saying that in English. For the second slide, introduce the phrases “no, thank you” and “my friend is waiting for me” and ask everyone to practice saying those, explaining how they might be used. For the third, introduce the phrases “are you really scared?” and “what are you needing?” and practice saying those with the class, explaining how they may be used.

At the end, summarize that what they learned helped them to survive a disaster all together by collaborating and leaning on each other’s support.

This activity was created by me with guidance from Veljko Armano Linta and fellow participants of an online course called Sustainability for Teachers with Gaia Education.