To make sense of the earthquake, the eighth-grade science class analyzed plate tectonics, used computer animation to simulate tremors of different magnitudes, and browsed satellite images to zero in on their family villages in Haiti. Down the hall, a kindergarten teacher took a lower-tech approach: piling Legos on two cardboard squares and bumping them together until the toy buildings crashed down.

In the fourth grade, a skinny, bright-eyed boy, dressed up for his first day back at his old school in a sweater-vest, tie and jeweled cross, needed no simulation to visualize the catastrophe. Joshua Joseph, 10, was playing Twister at his aunt’s house in Port-au-Prince when the world shook, sending him on an odyssey — sleeping outside, riding through streets that reeked of corpses, flying on an Air Force plane — that brought him back to SS. Joachim and Anne, the parish school he left two years ago when his parents sent him to Haiti to get to know their home country.

Last week’s earthquake has devastated Haiti, and prompted a massive relief effort. In a smaller but almost equally intense way, the disaster has pervaded every part of the school day for the 510 students — 80 percent of them Haitian — at SS. Joachim and Anne, the Roman Catholic elementary school in Queens Village, Queens, a hub of New York’s Haitian community.

They pray. They scrounge up donations. The quake informs class discussions about politics, about helping the poor, about the afterlife. And when the children are not talking about it, their teachers suspect, they are thinking about it.