Weather Watchers

Students will divide into weather teams. Each week, a different team will monitor the local weather through a wireless weather data monitor and post information in our class weather journal; as well as on the global weather Web site. They will then write a morning weather report, edit it, and film with a Flip Camera. After posting this to our class Web page, they will present the information on the school-wide morning announcements and send a copy to the local television news station.
Periodically, the class will review the past weather data and make inferences about our local trends and weather patterns. Students will create graphs with this data and compare our area to other regions around the world by looking at the information posted by other schools on the global weather Web site. Students will then find the median, mode, range, and mean of recent temperatures, barometric pressures, average rainfall, etc.
As a follow-up to this morning routine, students can write weather related expository articles and poetry, and research various weather phenomena including local weather folklore. Students can also incorporate drama through acting out scenes such as the water cycle, and can sing songs to help in vocabulary memorization and understanding. Songs can be found on teachertube (Cool Water Cycle Song).
Students can also participate in art activities related to weather such as using paint and cotton to make a "type of clouds" display; or use shoeboxes to build dioramas of various climate zones.
Student work will be graded on a rubric which will include participation, research skills, cooperative work, accuracy of data, creativity of projects, and their score on an "end of grade science test" type assessment.