Tracking and predicting the weather

William Lubansky
King of Grace Elementary School
Golden Valley, MN 55422
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Summary

Students will track barometric pressure, wind direction, temperature, and clouds. The class will record daily readings in these for areas and attempt to formulate patterns to use in forecasting the weather based on these elements.

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Learning Goals

This activity is designed to teach students observation skills (identifying clouds), and how to record data in order to make predictions. Students will use critical thinking and data analysis in order to make their predictions.

Context for Use

This activity could be used as part of your daily class or as an ongoing science lesson. Vocabulary, terms, and what those terms mean can be discussed and studied in great detail or just touched upon depending on the grade level. Predictions can be made without a complete understanding of barometric pressure etc. I would introduce this activity after teaching my standard weather curriculum.

Description and Teaching Materials

Each day, a designated weather student or the teacher will access four areas to be used for tracking and predicting the weather. These areas are barometric pressure, wind direction, temperature, and cloud type. This information must be recorded in such a way that you can, as a class, study and look for patterns in the weather based on these four elements.

The weather channel desktop program will allow you to access detailed information about your weather conditions, including details such as uv index, dew point, humidity, visibility, pressure, wind, sunrise, sunset, and moon phase. All of this information is on one page. You can also access a weather map with symbols for fronts and H & L pressure areas.

Websites:
http://www.weatherwizkids.com/cloud.htm
http://www.weather.com/ (download the weather channel desktop, it's free)

Teaching Notes and Tips

The Internet or the local newspaper can be used to access information for this lesson. I've included the websites I use for cloud identification and weather maps. Depending on grade level you can add or subtract items you track, how detailed you track them, and how often you want to track. You may want to just look at what the conditions were prior to a rainstorm, thunderstorm, hot weather etc. and use this as a way of predicting the weather.

Assessment

Each student will be asked to make a weather prediction based on the information gathered. The prediction must also include an explanation of what the student is basing that prediction on and why. A short quiz can be used to evaluate the student's understanding of how each weather element helps us to predict the weather.

Standards

3.III.B.1 Students will measure, record, and describe weather conditions using common instruments.

References and Resources