Just completed 1/2 of my lesson today on the Streamflow-Precipitation Lesson. I was very excited since we are going through a "major" precipitation event in the Massachusetts and kind of led the investigation to tie in with current events. The kids were so excited in the real time data that I changed the dataset to 2008 (from 2007) when the kids were looking at the USGS site charts. The students were very excited about downloading the data that was generated by the USGS (they did not have to input the data into a spreadsheet), saving it as a text file, then importing into a spreadsheet. Students also learned how to clean up data to be used for analysis. All students were able to get to this point. We probably would have been able to get the precipitation except I have to pay for it (.org domain names do not get it free) and I had downloaded the 2007 dataset not the 2008. It will be interesting on what the 2008 precip dataset from NOAA will have by Monday on this current "precipitation" event. I only did this with one class (out of three). The other classes will not be able to do this until January. I will post next week a student example. I would like to remind everyone that I am a technology teacher so you will see emphasis in my teaching towards technology as well as science inquiry.

Hi Maria,
This lesson sounds like it could be incorporated into my grade eight curriculum when we study erosion resulting from the force of moving water. Streamflow is definitely affected by the volume of water as well as slope, streambed shape etc. Thank you for the tip regarding the fact that .org domain names are not eligible for free data. Good luck with the next half of your lesson.

I finished the assignment with my students. Students were still engaged in the process of creating two axis spreadsheet and chart. The Brockton Precipitation only had data until the end of October. What I might do is have students predict what the precipitation is if the streamflow is at a particlar point. When the realtime data comes through we can see how effective our computer model was.

This is my final report on the assignment.