Long Beach WRAP

Lesson Title or Topic: Weather

Program Leader: ______Date: ______

Grade Level: K-2 School Site: ______

Created by: Hank Waddles

Materials Needed: (List)

  1. Outdoor thermometer
  2. Construction paper (students’ notebook paper could be substituted), pencils, crayons or colored pencils

Preparation Time: As long as it takes to gather supplies.

Lesson time: 20 minutes Monday, 5-10 minutes Tuesday through Thursday

Content Standard(s)Kindergarten: Earth Sciences 3B: Students know changes in weather occur from day to day and across seasons, affecting Earth and its inhabitants.

What will be learned from this activity? (Objective)

  1. Students will learn that the weather changes from day to day by keeping a week-long weather diary.

Steps of the lesson: (Scientific Method of Investigation)

Introduction: (Questions/Hypothesis):

  1. How many of you wore jackets to school today? Why did you choose to wear a jacket or to leave it at home?
  2. Okay, some of you probably wore a jacket yesterday but didn’t today – or the other way around. Why can’t you just wear the same type of clothing every day? (Students should respond that the weather can change from one day to the next.)

Instruction:

  1. Today’s lesson is going to be about the weather and how it can change each day.
  2. Review what the weather has been like over the past few days, highlighting any changes.
  3. We’re going to keep track of the weather each day, including the temperature and other things we can observe.

Activity: (Procedure)

  1. Give each student a sheet of construction paper and a set of crayons.
  2. Demonstrate how to read the temperature on the thermometer.
  3. Discuss what the weather is like as you introduce various weather terms: cloudy, sunny, windy, foggy, cold, hot, cool, etc.
  4. Have students fold their paper into four sections and use the first section to record information about today’s weather.
  5. Repeat the process to quickly record information about the weather on three subsequent days.

Closure: (Conclusions/Results)

  1. Okay, what did we learn about the weather this week?
  2. Was each day exactly the same?
  3. Now that we can look back at what this week was like, what do we know about what the weather will be like next week? (Students should realize that the weather should continue to change from day to day.)