Meteorologist For a Day!

Time: 1 week
Materials Required:
- Colored map of the United States
- Weather symbols
- Stop-motion app on iPad
- Green screen app on iPad
- iPad
- Green Screen


Introduction - Watch a short clip on YouTube of a local meteorologist forecasting the day's weather. Ask students how the weather map behind the meteorologist works. After students offer ideas, explain that the meteorologist stands in front of a green screen. Today, students are going to get the awesome opportunity to be meteorologists as they forecast weather in front of their very own green screens!

Development - The teacher will work with the students to write a detailed weather forecast for their own city. Then, using the document camera and smartTV or Smart Board, the teacher will demonstrate how to show the weather symbols moving across the map, or showing up on the correct area. For example, a fronts typically move from west to east, so if a certain front is coming into an area, the teacher would move the symbol for the front through the map from west to east, landing on their city. As the teacher moves the symbol, he or she will verbalize the forecast written with the class. Then, the teacher will announce that students will do something similar with their own teams.

Teacher will pass out activity packet to students, and read each step with the class, ensuring that the students understand what they will be doing.

Independent - Using their science notebooks as a reference guide, student teams will write out a weather forecast for 15 different cities. Once they write out their forecast, they will make sure they have cut out the necessary weather symbols to represent the weather in each city.

Next, students will create a stop-motion video of the weather symbols moving across their United States map, based on each of the 15 forecasts they wrote.

Once the stop motion video is created, students will upload the video to their green screen app. Then, they will layer a video of themselves giving their weather forecast on top of the stop-motion video they created. They will read their forecasts as the stop-motion video plays. Students will probably require multiple takes before developing their finished product. No worries - that's part of learning!

Closure - Students will show their finished videos to the class on the smartTV or Smart Board. Then they will upload their videos to the class website for the rest of their learning community to view.

Adaptations: Gifted students should write more in-depth forecasts based on deeper study of climate patterns in specific areas. Students requiring remediation will write more basic forecasts, and will glue symbols onto their map instead of creating a stop-motion video.