For my investigation I had the students study the climates of three diffferent cities using Excel.

Hi Christine! This lesson looks great. I look forward to trying it with my students in the Spring (if that's alright). Did you do explain to students how a graph is read or works with 2 Y-axes? I foresee some of my students with Math challenges struggling with how to read a climatogram.

Thanks,
Jody

Jody-

I did explain how to read the climatograms. The day before we went to the computer lab, I projected a few climatograms on the screen in my classroom and we discussed what they meant and how to read them. They caught on pretty quickly.

Christine

Christine,

This lesson looks great. I teach weather and climate third trimester, so I plan on borrowing your lesson. I like how the kids need to use a lot of data, and end up combining it on the climatogram. I also think it would be interesting, after your lesson, to give them climatograms without the city name, to see if they could identify which biome the city is located in, based solely on the climatogram???

Great work,

MaryAnn

MaryAnn,

It would be great to show them climatograms and make them figure out where the city is. The best part was when the students analyzed the climatograms and explained the factors that caused each city's climate. For example, they had to figure out why Quito's temperatures are relatively cool in spite of its location on the equator. This led to a lot of critical thinking.

Thanks,
Christine

Christine,
What a great lesson! This pulls together so many pieces of both the life and physical science; it seems like it would also be a good culminating project/review for MCAS (not that we review for the MCAS :)). I also like the idea of having them see yet another type of graph; although some of the math-phobes might be intimidated by it at first, it reinforces the idea of a graph as an easy way to represent information, and perhaps takes away some of the math worries around it.
It sounds like the kids must have enjoyed it as well!