Dustbowl Activity

Which People Live in Dry and Dusty

Environments?

This activity is about looking at who live in dry, dusty environments. With low diversity of
vegetation and wildlife, how do they cope with living in these environments? Find out who
they are, and how they live. The main things your students should take away from this
exercise are the differences between everyday aspects of life.

Context

This activity was provided by Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots UK (www.rootsnshoots.org.uk)
a not for profit charity run by the Jane Goodall Institute (UK).

Each Roots & Shoots activity can either stand alone or be used as part of a themed mission.
Each mission is centred around a possible future that could happen if we fail to take care of
people, animals and the environment today and comes with a mission briefing comic and
teacher notes – find out more at http://www.rootsnshoots.org.uk/resources/.

In the Dustbowl Mission, Chrono-bot R00T5 travels to a

future where crops have failed, leading to dust storms, and
Kent is a strange, almost lunar, landscape with little or
nothing growing. R00T5 heads back to find out more – a
good place to start is by learning about people who live in
similarly dry and dusty environments today.

Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots Awards

By completing this activity sheet you may be eligible for an

award! See the end of this document for details.

© 2013 Jane Goodall Institute

What do I need to make it work?

Most of the background information on desert climate inhabitants can be found from (copy
and paste the short links into your browser):

General information: goo.gl/O8XxHF

The Tuareg People: goo.gl/qWAq1i

The Bedouin People: goo.gl/tYRa22

The Kalahari Bushmen: goo.gl/CfsDPO

The Australian Aborigines: goo.gl/B5hjiL

The Native Americans: goo.gl/9bql2w

It is also advised that you prepare pieces of both lined and plain A4 paper for each student
and several pieces of A3 plain card. You will also need coloured pens/pencils, thread (also
coloured if possible) and blu-tack or drawing pins. For mounting their stories and drawings
the students will need glue and safety scissors.

What things will my students create?

Each student will write a “day in the life” essay and draw and colour a picture of their desert
dweller. As a class they will also make a colour-coded regional map and mount these on the
wall.

How long will it take?

Each exercise should take 1hour of class time and 1.5 hours of homework time.

© 2013 Jane Goodall Institute

Exercise 1 – Learn about the people who live in the deserts today
The first part of this activity is about identifying where in the world people live in dry and
arid conditions. How do they cope, what do they eat, what are their lives like?

Step 1 – Class Discussion

Introduce the topic in class to your students. How many parts of the world can they think of
where people might live in such a climate. Make a list of these on the board and expand
your students' suggestions with some of the places from the references above which they
may not have heard of. Try and make as large a list as you can, including as many different
types of desert climate as possible.

Step 2 – Homework

Divide your class into as many groups as there are regions in your list, and assign each
group to a region the list. Have your students research the people of their region and write a
one page assignment in their notebooks for homework.

Things they can think about and include are:

• What sort of homes do they live in?

• What sort of clothes do they wear?
• What sort of food do they eat?
• How do they find and store water?
• What sort of jobs, professions or trades might they have?
• How do they travel?

Get each group to give a short presentation in class about the people they have learnt about.
Make a list on the board of any similarities between the different peoples and discuss with
your class why these similarities may occur despite many of these desert regions being far
apart.

Exercise 2 – “A Day In the Life . . .”

The second part of this activity expands on the students understanding of how different
the lives of desert inhabitants are to their own.

© 2013 Jane Goodall Institute

Now that your students have learnt more about desert inhabitants, get them to pick a
different group from the class list and write a short essay chronicling a day in their life.
These should go on one side of a piece of A4 paper, and their essays should cover the factors
explored in Exercise 1.

Get each of them to draw and colour in a picture of the person in their story on another
piece of A4 blank paper – these must be done in portrait orientation. Now pair up the
pictures with their stories and have the students carefully cut away a thin border from
around each piece of paper – about 5mm should do. For each desert region, select the best
story and picture and have the group working on that region stick them side by side on a
piece of plain A3 card. The trimmed pieces of paper should be placed so that they allow a
roughly even width of the backing card to show all around the story and picture. Have each
group pick a colour t represent their region and get them to colour the border of their
mounted story and picture.

For the next part of this you will need a black and white world map. You can find several
different types available online (copy and paste the short links into your browser):

• goo.gl/5inXYX

• goo.gl/59iEUh

Choose a map that you think will be most suitable for marking with the desert regions your
class has studied and print it out onto another piece of A3 card (you may need to first print
it out on A4 paper and then enlarge it).

Get each group to choose a different colour and using an atlas have them colour in their
region on the A3 map. Then get them to colour in the border on their mounted story and
picture. Now mount the map on the wall using either drawing pins or blu-tack and arrange
the stories around it. Using string (coloured in to match each region's colours) connect each
story and picture to the relevant region.

Ask your students to think of an appropriate title and make a banner to go above the
display.

© 2013 Jane Goodall Institute

Why not enter the Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots Awards
This resource was provided by Roots & Shoots UK, a not for profit charity run by the Jane
Goodall Institute (UK). One of the aims of Roots & Shoots is to inspire young people to care
for people, animals and the environment, and one of the ways that we like to do this is by
running annual awards every December.

Every school that uploads a story about their activities to the Roots & Shoots website at
www.rootsnshoots.org.uk automatically wins a bronze award certificate to display at school,
and the best stories win the chance for you and your children to meet Dr Jane Goodall
herself along with a host of other prizes.

See http://www.rootsnshoots.org.uk/awards/ for details about the awards and information

on how to upload your 'mission update' story and win!

Keep up to date with Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots in the UK

You can find us on Facebook at fb.com/RootsnShoots.org.uk and follow us on Twitter
@JaneGoodallUK or why not sign up for our weekly email newsletter full of inspiring
stories from our Roots & Shoots members in the UK at
http://www.rootsnshoots.org.uk/sign-me-up/

© 2013 Jane Goodall Institute