Help: this should be fun

I want to share my ideas for my lesson for middle school on the blog and see if anyone has some more ideas to add to it, also what I think would be really meaningful to my topic of personal censorship and helpful for everyone would be if after hearing about the lesson, you all posted a really heavy question from the point of view of the students in this class.

The point of this for me is to test myself. I don't want to be one of those teachers that buckles under pressure and stumbles for words or avoids the question completely. Just as Vanessa Lopez said in class, I want to make myself accessible to the students but what is the best way to go about doing that especially with certain heavy topics?

Example: Take Pangea for instance and how for some students who don't believe that the earth is that old because it does not fit in with the bible, say that there must have been a catastrophe that moved the continents the way they are that happened faster. I presented this to Mrs. Punch the science teacher as a sort of Creationism vs. Evolution question and she had a great answer. She said that there are layers and layers of rock that scientists have been monitoring and it takes a certain amount of time for them to form, they can then assume that if it takes that long then based on the amount of layers the earth be about this old. It doesn't mean that the bible is wrong, the 7 days to us may not be 7 days to God so the creation of the earth may have taken a really long time and gone through many changes. The first instance of evolution is actually mentioned in the bible. The snake was cursed for deceiving Eve and God said "You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dirt all the days of your life" Some snakes even have vestigial legs. The people who wrote the bible way back then had no idea about evolution... interesting.

The issue is to be able to give your own opinion with adequate support without putting down the views of a student, taking them seriously.

There will always be the kid with smart a** questions, but I want to be able to have answers ready for him or her too.

What do you think?

Here is my lesson so far:

Earthquakes and Social Justice. I want students to break up into groups and pick from 4 areas of the world that suffer most frequently from earthquakes, who lives in those fault zones and why? What do their dwellings look like? What is their financial status? What happens during an earthquake there? Who responds to the disaster?

They are going to make dwellings similar to the ones in their specific area, but made better based on the information I will give them on the new progression in Earthquake safe houses. They will be 3-dimensional constructions focusing on structural soundness in sculptures, and in architecture after learning joining and bonding techniques in sculpture as well.

The major issues I am hoping will come up are the fact that some governments refuse to pay for safe structures for their lower class citizens and when an earthquake happens people die as a result. What are some questions you anticipate 6th grade students asking?

I will do my best to answer them, and then if you have any ideas for the lesson feel free to contribute those too, as well as better answers to questions if you can think of some.

Thanks!

~Carly