What is a drought? A drought is a lengthy period of unusually low rainfall, which causes a water shortage. It has a negative impact on local residents’ quality of life, animal survival, and crop growth. 

Well, can you imagine what a disaster it is if you experience 10 years of drought? People in the 1930s have already encountered that! The Dust Bowl is a part of our history, and your kids should be educated about it. 

But before you do that, we as adults should be knowledgeable about it ourselves. Here are things you should know about the Dust Bowl.

What Was the Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl was a region of the Midwest that experienced drought during the 1930s and Great Depression. The Dust Bowl affected Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico.

Droughts came in waves, one after the other. Just as farms were beginning to recover, another drought struck. Crops in the fields died, and after the crops dried up, they no longer held the soil in place. 

Huge dust storms carried away topsoil. These storms, which were known as black blizzards, just kept coming.

Over 35 significant dust storms occurred in one year, in 1933. 

A massive dust storm arose on April 14, 1935. It covered everything in its path with a thick, black layer of dust as it traveled across the United States at a rapid pace for hundreds of miles. 

The sky was pitch-black like night. 12 million tons of dust were dropped on Chicago by the dust storm. It even reached New York City. Black Sunday was the name of this day.

The storms contributed significantly to the Great Depression's issues and lasted for almost ten years.

Cause

Grain prices fell in the 1920s, forcing many farmers to farm more land in order to maintain their level of income. Midwest farmers cleared the prairie lands to build more farms. Some people cautioned that using the land this way would prevent it from being productive. But few farmers didn't pay attention as they had a family to feed. 

The crops died as a result of the subsequent heat wave and drought. The ground hardened into rock. The hard ground was carried away as dust by sudden, strong winds. There weren't any plants or trees to keep it in place.

Effect

One of the worst environmental catastrophes in American history is still regarded as having occurred during the Dust Bowl era. 

Due to the failure of their crops, farmers were unable to pay their bills. In turn, banks forced some people to sell their farms. 

Many other survivors who made it through the Dust Bowl lost everything they owned and left the region in search of work elsewhere in the nation. Thousands of people passed away due to starvation or from breathing in the dust. There was a significant population shift because of this ecological disaster.

To tell the tales of the people impacted by the dust storms, numerous songs, books, and pieces of art were produced, such as the novels The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and the songs of folk singer Woody Guthrie. Likewise, the photographs by Dorothea Lange, who captured numerous Dust Bowl refugees and their families, are some of these works' most well-known examples.

Government Aid

Plans were put in place by the government to preserve the grasslands. The government limited farming practices and increased grass and tree planting.

The federal government established programs to aid the farmers who remained in the Dust Bowl. To help the soil be preserved, they instructed farmers about proper farming methods. They also bought some land to stop future dust storms and plan to let it regenerate. By the early 1940s, most of the land had recovered after a lengthy period of wreckage.

Activities for Kids

Below are some activities your kids can do to feed their curiosity and inspire them to embark on their independent learning journeys. 

Watch the "Time Machine: the 1930s" video

To do: Compose a journal entry.

This popular video from the Storyworks library will help children comprehend this blog post more thoroughly by giving them detailed background information on the decade in which it is set.

Lesson Objective: Ask the kids to write a diary entry describing an average day using at least five details from the video, pretending they are young people living in the 1930s.

Read a pick-your-own-adventure novel based on the Dust Bowl

To do: Hold a debate

The fantastic "You Choose" history series places kids right in the middle of historical eras and sends them on interactive quests. Readers will be inspired to choose between three unfavorable options; staying in Kansas to farm, moving to California, or working as a government photographer.

Lesson Objective: Hold a discussion in which kids describe the route they took through the book and their reasoning for it.

Present images about the Dust Bowl

To do: A text that shows an exercise

Your kids will be engaged by the beauty of these compelling documentary pictures of the Dust Bowl's landscapes and inhabitants.

Lesson Objective: Ask the kids to select five of the images and create new captions for them.

Conclusion

As a nation, we learned plenty of lessons from the Dust Bowl – from exploring better land management strategies to maintaining grass cover that retains moisture and keeps topsoil in place. 

All in all, the Dust Bowl may be a horrible experience since it took lives and gave people hardships, but it gave a lesson all of us will never forget and made our country a better place.