Overview | What do King Tut and impoverished people living in tropical zones have in common? In this lesson, students reflect on malaria through the ages and then create an installation exhibit to educate their peers about the science, health issues and history of malaria.
Materials | Computers with Internet access, images, photographs or printer, research resources, mosquito bed net, copies of handouts.
Warm-Up | Introduce the topic by having students take this quick quiz (PDF) to find out how much they know about malaria and its recent appearances in the news.
Ask: What did you find surprising? What else have you heard or do you know about malaria? What is being done where you live, if anything, to help combat malaria in poorer nations around the world? What other questions do you have? Record students’ questions on chart paper or a whiteboard for future reference.
Then, follow up the discussion by viewing the slide show “Where Malaria Still Kills.” Note that the photographs are provided courtesy of the Malaria Consortium, and are part of an eight-week exhibition at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan that begins March 15, 2010. For each slide, have a volunteer read the caption aloud. Encourage students to respond to the information and stories with their own comments and questions.
After the slide show, you might also ask: Which images did you find the most powerful or moving and why? Do you worry about or try to avoid mosquito bites where you live and travel? Why or why not? If you do, how do you try to fend off mosquitoes? What mosquito-borne illnesses are prevalent where we live? How are these illnesses similar and different from malaria in terms of threat, severity and treatment? How would your life be different if you lived in a country plagued by malaria?
Related | In the article “Malaria: A Scourge as Old as King Tut,” John Noble Wilford reports on mankind’s long history with the Anopheles mosquito and the parasite that causes malaria:
In death if not in life, a bond unites King Tut, Egypt’s boy pharaoh, with the multitudes high and especially low through human history. Palace walls could not shield him from the enemy without: the anopheles mosquitoes infesting the Nile Valley with malaria parasites. A post-mortem on Tutankhamen’s mummy, scientists reported last week, shows that malaria was one of the most probable agents of his death at age 19, in the 14th century B.C.
Tut’s case may be one of the earliest established by genetic tests, but malaria was probably a common scourge then, as it still is. Last year, at least 250 million people contracted the disease, the United Nations estimates, and almost half the world’s population is at risk, mainly in poorer tropical lands. […]
If there is anything to the mummy’s curse, it may be delivered by mosquitoes.
Read the entire article with your class, using the questions below.
Questions | For reading comprehension and discussion:
- What did scientists and archaeologists recently learn about King Tut?
- What are some other names for malaria? Where did these names derive from?
- How has malaria shaped or changed the course of history?
- If “malaria has been largely eradicated in wealthier countries, and is easily treatable with medicines,” why do you think people living in poor, tropical places are still at risk?
- What solutions can you think of to combat malaria?
From The Learning Network
- Health Guide: Malaria
- Audio Slide Show: Fighting an Old Scourge
- Article: A $10 Mosquito Net Is Making Charity Cool
Around the Web
Activity | Explain that students will work in pairs or small groups to make an installation exhibit in their school to educate themselves and their classmates about malaria. At this point or before class, hang a mosquito net in the classroom or a public space like the school library.
Ideally, hang the net in a way so students have some space to move around and under it. One net is probably enough, but if you have a large group or many classes, you might consider creating many spaces with multiple nets. (For every net you use for educational purposes, you might consider buying and donating one or more nets to an organization that distributes them for use in Africa and other countries, like Nothing But Nets.)
Explain that mosquito nets work by preventing the Anopheles mosquito, the carrier of the parasite that causes malaria, from biting people who sleep under them. You may want to provide time for students to touch, explore and ask questions about the mosquito net before explaining the project.
Tell students that today they will create the first part of their exhibit: hanging photographs, diagrams and other images that relate to malaria on the outside of the mosquito net. On the back of each image, students will provide “fact bites” in Q. & A. format that tell more about their topic and picture. They will use the net as a place to display their work and images.
Assign each student or small group a topic related to malaria. Here is a list to get you started:
- Anopheles mosquitoes.
- Transmission cycle of malaria.
- Malaria prevention.
- ITN’s – Insectide-Treated Bed Nets.
- Anti-malarial drugs.
- Artemisinin-based combination therapies (A.C.T.’s).
- Malaria mortality and disease statistics.
- Malaria information for travelers.
- Malaria and children.
- Malaria and pregnant women.
- Malaria and poverty.
- Malaria and other diseases (H.I.V./AIDS, dengue, etc.).
- Malaria and the Nobel Prize.
- Diagnostic tests.
- Drug Resistance.
- Vaccine development efforts.
- Geographic regions affected by malaria.
- Economic costs of malaria.
- Malaria and climate change.
Provide students with the following online resources, along with those listed above in Related Resources and any available print materials, to help them find a photograph and research their topic. Students might use the handout Mosquito ‘Bites’ (PDF) to create their “fact bites.”
Online resources include the New York Times Health Guide on Malaria, the malaria information pages from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute. Other useful Web resources: KidsHealth: Malaria, All About Malaria and SciDev.net: Health: Malaria.
Students might refer to the class list of questions they created in the initial exercise to help them brainstorm possible questions related to their topic. Promote good questioning skills by having students hand in a copy of the three questions they plan to include. (Keep a list of questions for the scavenger hunt activity described below.) You might sign off on these questions before they add them to their final product.
Explain that they should “boil down” their research and information into the three most important questions and answers. Stress that composing clear and valuable questions is as important as providing accurate and succinct answers.
Have each group show their image or photograph to the class and share one piece of information that they learned. Then, have students display their finished products on the mosquito net.
Going Further | Using students’ questions, create a scavenger hunt handout that lists 10 to 15 of the most important ideas about malaria. You might also add images to the scavenger hunt, so students are searching for visual as well as written information. In a future class, have students complete the scavenger hunt by searching the images and information hung on the class mosquito net. You might also consider having copies of the scavenger hunt available for other students and exhibit visitors.
Additionally, students might collaborate and add more about malaria by creating a theme for a mini-exhibit to be placed under the mosquito net. For example, students might use their historical knowledge and the recent discovery about King Tut’s death to imagine how ancient Egyptians might have been affected by malaria. To provide context and motivation, have students pretend they are creating an exhibit to be added to this traveling exhibition on King Tut.
Or students might do a cross-curricular project with a history or literature class and design their exhibit around a different time period or location, like the 19th century United States or ancient Rome, or on references to malaria in literature.
Students might also focus the inside space on activism and what they can do to help combat malaria. This might include the efforts by organizations such as Malaria No More or the Gates Foundation’s work on malaria. They might culminate this with a fund-raiser.
Standards | From McREL, for grades six to 12:
3 – Knows a range of subject matter, symbols and potential ideas in the visual arts.
2 – Knows the location of places, geographic features and patterns of the environment.
2 – Knows environmental and external factors that affect individual and community health.
8 – Knows essential concepts about the prevention and control of disease.
9 – Knows techniques to prevent the spread of illness and disease.
11 – Knows health risk factors and techniques to manage and reduce those risks.
3 – Understands the people, events, problems and ideas that were significant in creating the history of their state.
7 – Understands selected attributes and historical developments of societies in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe.
5 – Understands the structure and function of cells and organisms.
6 – Understands relationships among organisms and their physical environment.
7 – Understands biological evolution and the diversity of life.
3 – Understands the relationships among science, technology, society and the individual.