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