For our final lesson in our weather unit, the lesson will consist of information about clouds. The lesson will help students understand how clouds form and different cloud types. The students will be using these sites to look for information about clouds:
http://www.carlwozniak.com/clouds/
http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/edu_act/clouds.html
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/cld/cldtyp/home.rxml
On these sites, students will locate information about cloud formation and cloud types. After they have found their information, the students will type up a paper. The paper length is only half of a page to one page. The students will print their papers out and hand them to me. Then the students will watch two videos on YouTube that are based on clouds. One video shows different cloud types and the other video shows how to predict weather by looking at clouds. Here are the sites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur0k7UDrrvg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJCIzpjBxuI&feature=related
After watching the videos, I will have a discussion with the class about what new information they have learned about clouds. My discussion is a time for reflecting on what the students have learned. When our discussion is finished, the students will be given a handout based on different cloud types. This handout is my lesson extension. The students will read the information given in the handout and then will answer the thirteen questions that go along with the reading.
The last question is kind of a test to see if the students understand the different cloud types. The students have to go to this blog site and watch the video I have posted below this blog. The students will watch this video and determine the cloud type they see in the video. They will put their answer on the blank line below question number thirteen on the handout. The students will give their handouts to me when they are finished. These handouts will be graded to see if the students understood the purpose of the lesson about clouds. Also, I told the students when they are at home, I want them to find pictures of different cloud types, post them on the blog, and label the type of cloud that is presented in each picture. If you would like to assist them in their leraning, feel free to do so; possibly they can teach you something new. If you have any questions or comments regarding this lesson, please e-mail, call, or leave a comment.
Miss Bennett
Friday, November 21, 2008
Cloud Video for Lesson 7
Students, look at this video and determine the type of clouds that are shown.
Miss Bennett
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Lesson 6 - The Water Cycle
For our sixth lesson in our weather unit is about the water cycle. This lesson allows the students to gain knowledge about how water travels in a cycle and the major components of the water cycle such as: evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.
The first part of the lesson that I am going to discuss with the students is where water comes from. Then, the students will go to this YouTube video site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YswL4dIDQuk. This video shares a song that will help the students remember how the water cycle occurs. After watching the video, I will explain key vocabulary terms that are associated with the water cycle such as evaporation and condensation. I will also give examples of evaporation and condensation.
Next, I will draw a visual representation of how the water cycle occurs. After this, I will explain the experiment that the students will be performing with a partner. The first step to the experiement is that the students must place a tablespoon of salt in the bottom of a plastic bowl. Then, they have to fill the bowl with about one inch of warm water. The students will taste water with their fingers to see if they can taste the salt.
Next, they will place the empty baby food jar in center of water. The students must cover the plastic bowl with plastic wrap and then set the marble on the center of the plastic wrap above the baby food jar. They will place it in a sunny spot for a few hours. Later, the students will check inside their baby food jars. There will be fresh water. They will taste it to see if it tastes salty. The warm water from the bowl evaporated, created condensation when it hit the cool plastic wrap, traveled down the plastic wrap to the center due to the weight of the marble, and dripped into the baby food jar as precipitation.
There will be a lesson extension that the students will have to do when the experiment is finished. My lesson extension is going to consist of me teaching a song to the students about the water cycle. The purpose of this is to help the students remember how the water cycle occurs. The tune I will be using for the song is the tune from the song She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain. Here is the song: “Water travels in a cycle, yes it does. Water travels in a cycle, yes it does. It goes up as evaporation, the clouds make condensation, it rains down precipitation, yes it does.”
The purpose of this lesson is to make sure the students understand that water travels in a cycle. Also, the lesson helps students remember the major components that consists in the water cycle. I figured that teaching them a catchy song will help the students remember how the water cycle occurs. If you have any questions or comments regarding this lesson, please e-mail, call, or leave a comment.
Miss Bennett
The first part of the lesson that I am going to discuss with the students is where water comes from. Then, the students will go to this YouTube video site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YswL4dIDQuk. This video shares a song that will help the students remember how the water cycle occurs. After watching the video, I will explain key vocabulary terms that are associated with the water cycle such as evaporation and condensation. I will also give examples of evaporation and condensation.
Next, I will draw a visual representation of how the water cycle occurs. After this, I will explain the experiment that the students will be performing with a partner. The first step to the experiement is that the students must place a tablespoon of salt in the bottom of a plastic bowl. Then, they have to fill the bowl with about one inch of warm water. The students will taste water with their fingers to see if they can taste the salt.
Next, they will place the empty baby food jar in center of water. The students must cover the plastic bowl with plastic wrap and then set the marble on the center of the plastic wrap above the baby food jar. They will place it in a sunny spot for a few hours. Later, the students will check inside their baby food jars. There will be fresh water. They will taste it to see if it tastes salty. The warm water from the bowl evaporated, created condensation when it hit the cool plastic wrap, traveled down the plastic wrap to the center due to the weight of the marble, and dripped into the baby food jar as precipitation.
There will be a lesson extension that the students will have to do when the experiment is finished. My lesson extension is going to consist of me teaching a song to the students about the water cycle. The purpose of this is to help the students remember how the water cycle occurs. The tune I will be using for the song is the tune from the song She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain. Here is the song: “Water travels in a cycle, yes it does. Water travels in a cycle, yes it does. It goes up as evaporation, the clouds make condensation, it rains down precipitation, yes it does.”
The purpose of this lesson is to make sure the students understand that water travels in a cycle. Also, the lesson helps students remember the major components that consists in the water cycle. I figured that teaching them a catchy song will help the students remember how the water cycle occurs. If you have any questions or comments regarding this lesson, please e-mail, call, or leave a comment.
Miss Bennett
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Lesson 5 - Hurricanes
For our fifth lesson in our weather unit and our natural disaster block is hurricanes. This lesson provides information on what are hurricanes and how hurricanes occur. In this lesson, the students will use such sites as:
http://www.fema.gov/kids/hurr.htm
http://library.thinkquest.org/J0112821/famous.html
http://www.hurricanews.com/category/famous-hurricanes
The students are going to locate information about hurricanes on the Internet. After the students have found the information they needed, the students will type up a half-page paper about hurricanes. They will print their papers out and hand them to me. Then, the students will be given a list of sites to locate information about famous hurricanes that have occurred in the past or just recently such as Hurricane Ike. The students will read the information on these sites just to see how different the hurricanes affected people’s lives.
After that the students will go to this YouTube video site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yd5WreHxPg. The students will watch this video of Hurricane Katrina to see what an actual hurricane looks like and the damage it causes. I will have a discussion with the students to get their input on how they would feel if a hurricane occurred in their town.
There will be a lesson extension that I created for the students to learn more about hurricanes. The lesson extension will be a handout about hurricanes. The handout consists of a story about a boy named John. John is at his family’s cottage and notices that the weather is changing and that he is about to witness a hurricane. The story consists of factual information about hurricanes and the students will have to answer five questions about this story. When finished with this activity, the students will hand in their worksheets to me.
The purpose of my lesson is to make sure that the students understand what a hurricane is and how it occurs. I will also take note on how well the students are researching information on the Internet. By now the students should have no problem locating information on the Internet since most of my previous lessons consisted of Internet use. If you have any questions or comments regarding this lesson, please e-mail, call, or leave a comment.
Miss Bennett
http://www.fema.gov/kids/hurr.htm
http://library.thinkquest.org/J0112821/famous.html
http://www.hurricanews.com/category/famous-hurricanes
The students are going to locate information about hurricanes on the Internet. After the students have found the information they needed, the students will type up a half-page paper about hurricanes. They will print their papers out and hand them to me. Then, the students will be given a list of sites to locate information about famous hurricanes that have occurred in the past or just recently such as Hurricane Ike. The students will read the information on these sites just to see how different the hurricanes affected people’s lives.
After that the students will go to this YouTube video site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yd5WreHxPg. The students will watch this video of Hurricane Katrina to see what an actual hurricane looks like and the damage it causes. I will have a discussion with the students to get their input on how they would feel if a hurricane occurred in their town.
There will be a lesson extension that I created for the students to learn more about hurricanes. The lesson extension will be a handout about hurricanes. The handout consists of a story about a boy named John. John is at his family’s cottage and notices that the weather is changing and that he is about to witness a hurricane. The story consists of factual information about hurricanes and the students will have to answer five questions about this story. When finished with this activity, the students will hand in their worksheets to me.
The purpose of my lesson is to make sure that the students understand what a hurricane is and how it occurs. I will also take note on how well the students are researching information on the Internet. By now the students should have no problem locating information on the Internet since most of my previous lessons consisted of Internet use. If you have any questions or comments regarding this lesson, please e-mail, call, or leave a comment.
Miss Bennett
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Lesson 4- Tornados!
For our fourth lesson we will teach our students about Tornados. This lesson is an activity that allows students to see the workings of a tornado. All you need are 2 2 liter bottles, a tornado adapter/connector and something like food dye to put in the bottles. Once one of the bottles has water in it and they are connected you start to rock them back and forth to create a funnel effect and then watch as the water turns just like what a tornado would do. This lesson is really interactive and the students will enjoy this lesson and they might even show you when they get home!
If you have any questions, comments or concerns please let me know.
Mr. Anderson
If you have any questions, comments or concerns please let me know.
Mr. Anderson
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Lesson 3 - Rain Formation and Flash Floods
For our third lesson, the students will begin their block of natural disasters. The first natural disaster they are going to study are flash floods. This lesson provides the students on information of how rain is formed and how floods occur. In this lesson, the students will be using such sites as:
The students are going to research information about rain formation and how floods occur on the Internet. After the students have found the information they needed, the students will then type up a half-page paper on how rain forms and how floods occur. The students will print out their papers and hand them to me. The students will then research about famous floods that occurred throughout history such as, the 1953 flood disaster in the Netherlands. The students will read the articles on these sites just to see how floods can be a major disaster to people's lives and the earth itself.
After that, the students will then go to this site:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDtBby7lJX0. The students will watch this video to see what an actual flash flood looks like. I will have a discussion with the students to get their input on how they would feel if a flash flood occurred in their town.
There will be a lesson extension that deals with rain. The lesson extension will be a rain experiment to show students how rain forms. The students will have groups of two. The students will be given a glass jar, plate, two index cards for each student, ice cubes, and hot water. The students will pour approximately two inches of hot water into the glass jar. The students will then cover the jar with the plate and wait a few minutes before they start the next step. Lastly, the students will put the ice cubes on the plate. The students will write down on the index card on what happens after the students put the ice cubes on the plate. The students will hand in their index cards to me. I will read their answers to see if they understand the concept of rain formation.
The point of my whole lesson is to make sure the students understand how rain forms and how floods occur. I will also observe how the students locate information on the Internet and how well the students work with a partner during the rain experiment. Hopefully, the students will have no troubles finding information on the sites I will give them and have no troubles with the experiment. If you have any questions or comments regarding this lesson, please e-mail, call, or leave a comment.
Miss Bennett
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Lesson 2- How the Wind Blows
For our second lesson our students will learn how to use an anemometer and measure the speed of wind. An anemometer is a device that measures the speed of wind and can easily be made by the students, all you need is a regular pencil with an eraser, 4 drinking straws, 4 dixie cups, a highlighter and a push pin to make one. An anemometer is pictured here so you can see one. Once it is assembled one of the dixie cups should have it's bottom colored so you can keep track of how many times the cups spin around.
Once students complete their chart the class will head inside and fill out the ABCs of weather as an introduction to see what weather terms they know. We will fill this out as a class.
Please feel free to call, email, or leave a comment if you have any comments or concerns.
Mr. Anderson
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Lesson 1 - Using the Internet to Study Weather
The first lesson the students are going to do is an introductory lesson of our weather unit. The lesson is designed to help students study the weather by using the Internet. In this lesson, the students will be given instructions to locate some cities in the United States by using Internet sites such as: www.weather.com or www.cnn.com, etc.
Once the students are on this site, they will find the weather forecast of that city for over the next week including precipitation and temperatures. The students will record their results on Microsoft Word and include the site they used to help them with their research. They will print out the copy of their results and hand it to me. The students will do the same instructions except now they will be finding cities in other countries such as Rome, Italy; Paris, France; etc. They will also record their results and print a copy for me.
The students will then go to the site: www.weather.gov/view/national.php?thumbs=on. The students will click on the links of certain states that they did not use from the previous activity. When the students click on a link they will record the current observations of that state on notebook paper. When finished recording their results, the students will share their observations with other students in the class.
The extension of this lesson is that the students are going to create a table in Microsoft Word. In that table, the students will type their observations they recorded on the notebook paper. The table will have five rows and nine columns. The top row will consist of the title for each state and below each title are its observations such as temperature, relative humidity, etc. The students will print out a copy of their tables and will hand them into me, the teacher.
The point of this lesson is to observe and grade the students' ability to use the Internet to find information. The use of the Internet is important for the students because the Internet is just the beginning of the use of technology the students will come in contact with for helping them throughout their education career. I want to see how well the students adapt to using a computer and finding information on the Internet.
The students will also use a computer program called Microsoft Word which will become very familiar with students because they are most likely going to use Microsoft Word for writing essays, letters or creating charts. I would like to see how well the students use this program because it is going to important for them in the future to complete assignments by using this program.
Once the students are on this site, they will find the weather forecast of that city for over the next week including precipitation and temperatures. The students will record their results on Microsoft Word and include the site they used to help them with their research. They will print out the copy of their results and hand it to me. The students will do the same instructions except now they will be finding cities in other countries such as Rome, Italy; Paris, France; etc. They will also record their results and print a copy for me.
The students will then go to the site: www.weather.gov/view/national.php?thumbs=on. The students will click on the links of certain states that they did not use from the previous activity. When the students click on a link they will record the current observations of that state on notebook paper. When finished recording their results, the students will share their observations with other students in the class.
The extension of this lesson is that the students are going to create a table in Microsoft Word. In that table, the students will type their observations they recorded on the notebook paper. The table will have five rows and nine columns. The top row will consist of the title for each state and below each title are its observations such as temperature, relative humidity, etc. The students will print out a copy of their tables and will hand them into me, the teacher.
The point of this lesson is to observe and grade the students' ability to use the Internet to find information. The use of the Internet is important for the students because the Internet is just the beginning of the use of technology the students will come in contact with for helping them throughout their education career. I want to see how well the students adapt to using a computer and finding information on the Internet.
The students will also use a computer program called Microsoft Word which will become very familiar with students because they are most likely going to use Microsoft Word for writing essays, letters or creating charts. I would like to see how well the students use this program because it is going to important for them in the future to complete assignments by using this program.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Weather Unit
Our next topic in science will be weather. There will be ten lessons taught for our weather unit. Some of the topics we will cover will involve: using the Internet to study the weather, natural disasters (4 lessons-floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards), types of clouds, wind, types of precipitation, weather changes with all the seasons, and the water cycle.
Some links that will help further our understanding of weather are:
http://www.weather.com/
http://www.maps.google.com/
http://www.weatherwizkids.com/
www.42explore.com/weather.htm
www.weather.gov/view/national.php?thumbs=on
During these lessons, students will be asked to use certain technology to help them gain more knowledge about the weather. Some technology that may be used are: the Internet, flip video cameras, Microsoft programs, some YouTube videos, and possibly more that will be incorporated in each lesson. Technology is a big part of education today and we would like to help your child gain more knowledge about technology because it will most likely help your child in further assignments during their education career.
If you have any questions regarding the weather unit or the use of technology, just contact me or Craig Anderson. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Allyson Bennett and Craig Anderson
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