A note on weather

Weather lesson plans may be put away for the summer, but many teachers take the time in the summer to gather resources for the upcoming school year. If you are not a year-round school, you likely are already more than 1/3 done with your summer vacation. Here, I present a weather lesson on using weather maps. Students will investigate weather map symbols and their use in creating forecasts. Ultimately, students will produce a mock forecast.

The trick to this lesson is that the teacher needs to do just a bit of prep for the assessment by gathering weather reports from a newspaper 5 days before the lesson begins. Students use these, with the dates removed, to build up to their assessment activity (making a mock forecast). As students present their forecasts, the class can vote for who they think has the most accurate forecast. The beauty is that, if all goes well, the weather the day of the assessment presentations will be the answer. Gathering the weather prior to the assignment means that the teacher only needs to check the daily newspaper and look outside to see how accurate the mock forecasts are! Go to the Mock Forecast Lesson Plan now.