Pandemics lesson plan

The Pandemic Lesson Plan provides teachers and students with an opportunity to investigate pandemics through individual or classroom activities.

This lesson challenges students to learn more about pandemics by asking them to:

Teacher notes and assessment ideas are also included within these lesson plans as are more detailed curriculum links.

Key Learning Areas

The Key Learning Areas (KLAs) for this lesson plan include:

  • English/Literacy
  • Health and Physical Education
  • Science
  • Personal Development
  • SOSE
  • Personal Learning

Objectives

Some of the objectives of these lesson plans are to ensure that students are able to:

  • know how to prevent a pandemic from spreading
  • develop an awareness and understanding of the effect of pandemics
  • develop their research skills and begin to explore a wider variety of sources.

Please note: These lessons can be modified to incorporate other KLAs and to meet the needs of the students and specific content taught.

Get the Facts

The word ‘pandemic’ is used to describe an epidemic that affects the whole population across every continent.

If left unchecked, a pandemic can destroy towns and cities, even countries. The great pandemics include the Black Death (mid 1300s), which wiped out 70 per cent of Europe’s population by 1400. The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1920 killed up to 100 million people worldwide.

In recent times, a new human influenza virus that was discovered in Mexico in April 2009 was identified as Pandemic H1N1 2009, also referred to as ‘Human Swine Flu’. This strain of influenza spread rapidly throughout the country and across borders. The first case of H1N1 was confirmed in Australia on 9 May 2009.

As at 18 December 2009 there were 37,537 confirmed cases of H1N1 in Australia, although health officials believe that this is only a small proportion of the actual cases. At 18 December 2009, 191 people had died as a result of contracting H1N1, with indigenous persons accounting for 13 percent of the deaths. Reports indicate that most of those who died had underlying medical conditions; including cancer, diabetes mellitus and morbid obesity, and only a small number of deaths had occurred where the individual was previously healthy. The median age of deaths is 54 years (range 3 to 86 years of age), compared to the median age for deaths from seasonal flu from 2001 to 2006, which was 83 years.

Pandemic Resources

Take Time to Investigate

Prior to completing the lesson plans students can investigate some background information on pandemic, individually, in pairs or in groups to find answers to the following:

  1. What is a pandemic?
  2. In Australia, what can we immunise against?
  3. What are some of the diseases/pandemics that Australia has encountered in the past?

Assessment Guide

Teachers can assess with questioning, through group discussion and direct observation how students are able to answer the Take Time to Investigate questions.

To make learning more engaging, students could be put into groups, assigned a question to research and then they could present their answers to the class.

Teachers can also observe individual participation in each of the groups as they present their responses.

Students can then use this information as the basis for their research to help them complete the lesson plan activities.

Additional teacher notes on assessment are contained within each of the lesson plans as well curriculum links.

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