Wildfire and wildfire environments provide interesting applications of the measurement and algebra standards. This unit introduces the components of a fire-safe and fire-wise environment. Students create a fire-wise location through calculations and measurement of percent slope, defensible space distance, and various vegetation separation distances. The unit plan culminates with students designing a fire-wise property and testing their fire-wise IQ.
The majority of information in this unit was taken from Living With Fire: A Guide for Homeowners (5 MB, PDF), generously provided to Illuminations by the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension.
Individual Lessons
Lesson 1 - Heating Up
In this lesson, students will discover the havoc that wildfire can cause. After learning about the factors that contribute to the spreading of a wildfire, students will use a probability model to determine the portion of a forest that might be destroyed by fire.
Lesson 2 - Investigating Fire Environments
Students consider the meaning of the term
variable, both in a mathematical and an everyday sense, by considering a text‑based "equation." Data regarding flame length, vegetation and fire speed will be organized in a table, and students will investigate correlations between variables using scatterplots and lines of best fit.
Lesson 3 - Creating A Firewise Defensible Space
Students will learn about creating defensible space around a home using a series of fire protection zones. Students will then draw the zones that surround a house and estimate the area of each zone.
Lesson 4 - How Steep Can You Be?
In this lesson, students consider the construction of a tool that will measure percent slope. They then use ideas about percent slope to determine recommended defensible space distances near a home.
Lesson 5 - Burning Questions
This is the culminating lesson for this unit. Students use information from a quiz, along with what they learned in the previous four lessons, to write a summary and finalize a property sketch. Students measure their own progress in a final activity by Testing Their Firewise IQ.
