Giuseppa and the Dragon: Storytelling and Focused Game to Introduce Pre-scholar Children to the Seismic Risk

Abstract

Italy is a seismic country being in the merging zone of African and Euro-Asiatic plates and several destructive earthquakes occurred in the last few decades. For this reason, it is important to educate children about seismic risk and make them aware of simple behaviors and expedients that can save their life. But, how can we explain seismic risks or what an earthquake is to pre-scholar children? It is not simple because, at this age, children do not know what the word “risk” means and entails. A method to explain earthquakes has been developed and tested in a school with the collaboration of teachers willing to educate their young students to deal with natural risks and teach how properly behave. The method consists in a story telling using a “butai-kamishibai” (Japanese imagine theatre) with manually sliding paper imagines. This old technique, used by wandering storyteller, is very incisive because the butai-kamishibai produces by itself a scenography that creates a strong involvement between the teller and the listeners. The story is about a young girl (named Giuseppa) traveling inside the Earth where she meets a dragon whose jumps cause earthquakes. Inside the story, there is a nursery rhyme explaining what to do when the dragon jumps and the school shakes (for instance, go under the desk, be far from windows, keep calm, line up in pairs and so on). The story telling has just the purpose to catch children attention while the nursery rhyme helps to teach, entertaining, the right behaviors to adopt during an earthquake. After a break during which children can create/color their own dragon, there is a game having the aim to draw up the life-saving actions. The game is developed by means of a magnetic blackboard divided in two parts (true and false), magnets of the story characters acting (in the right or wrong way) during an earthquake. One by one, children pick a magnet from a bag and put it on the right/wrong side of the blackboard explaining why. After the first test, this method has been carried out in several nursery schools always obtaining a positive outcome. Teachers love Giuseppa story because activities are proposed in a playful but, at the same time, seriously way especially when life-saving actions are showed communicating the importance of what children are learning.