Future Meterologists

The topic that I consider to be incredibly relevant to my students is one that they tend to be incredibly interested in and one that continues to depend on technology in the professional and educational world.  That is weather.  Living in a city such as Chicago, we experience every season and every type of weather system with the exception being hurricanes. Although, we do not experience the full extent of hurricanes here, they do affect our weather systems and are still of great interest to students.

The following websites are ones that I have found to be great resources in classrooms for teachers, students and parents that will motivate and increase students’ interests are:

http://www.weatherwizkids.com/

http://www.theweatherchannelkids.com/

These resources not only provide a wealth of kid friendly information about all kinds of weather, but they provide activities as well. Many of these activities can be placed into small centers for group work for students to explore on their own. The weatherchannelkids.com website allows students to interactively create a weather forecast. Students can create a 5-day forecast using weather information from the area where they live.  This site also has a section called “careers in meteorology”, which can encourage students to explore ways to make this a career in their future lives, which is great because this is an industry that is always advancing and is always in high demand.

These sites not only have interactive activities and games to engage students, they also provide tips to the students for keeping their families safe during dangerous weather conditions. Therefore, many of the students in many cases may be more knowledgeable than the parents in these issues. Students also learn the advancements in technology and the technology used in predicting the weather.

The weatherchannelkids.com is my favorite tool of the two. One activity that I would plan around this site is having the students get into groups and work together to predict the weather and create their own 5-Day forecast. Weatherchannelkids.com has a section where students can build their own weather forecast.  To start the activity, I may show a few clips of weather forecasts on news broadcasts, have the student recognize the vocabulary that they here. Then, I will tell them use the tools to interactively create their own 5-day forecast, which they can report over the school’s television system each week.

This tool will engage students because students enjoy activities that they can create on the computer. Also, the students will enjoy pretending to be meteorologist.

Challenges:

I would have to figure out how to make this a group activity where all of the students will be included in the activities. It will be hard for students to use this tool for homework if their families do not own computers or have internet access at home.

A New Experiment

I answered the following questions:

How might you set up this or a similar experiment for students in your classroom? How could you make this experiment more fun, interesting, or engaging for your students? How might you design this experiment so that it is relevant to students’ lives?

In my classroom this year, we have a serious popcorn issue. Our school sells popcorn everyday as a fundraiser for the sports department.  Since our lunch period is one of the later ones in the day, the students complain that the popcorn is always cold by the time we get to the lunch room. My students despise this. They want to have hot popcorn, just like the students who are in the earlier lunch periods.

In my classroom, I would have the students make insulators that they believe will keep the popcorn warm. I would put them into groups and have them test three different types of insulation with warm popcorn. I would provide the materials such as cloth, foil, boxes, etc. for the students to work with.

This is the project that would definitely engage the students because they will be solving a problem that they complain about daily. Therefore, this experiment will be relevant to their lives.