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.