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DISCUSS:
How do you know it’s winter where you live?
What changes do you notice?
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DISCUSS:
Suppose you wanted to find a great spot to build a snow fort next December.
What kinds of data could you collect to find a place with great weather for snow fort building?
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DISCUSS:
What’s the point of making predictions about the weather if we know that at least some of them will be wrong?
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In this lesson, students explore seasonal weather conditions across different regions. They investigate how weather patterns can be used to make predictions about future weather. In the activity, Snow Fort Weather, students organize daily temperature data from three snowy towns into a table so that they can compare weather conditions and predict which town is most likely to have the best weather for a snow fort festival next year.
Preview activity|
Thermometers (Fahrenheit) worksheet
Alternatively, you can print our Celsius Thermometers version. |
1 per pair |
| What's the Weather Answer Key teacher-only resource | 1 per class |
| What's the Weather Chart worksheet | 1 per pair |
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Crayons
We suggest each pair of students use one red crayon and one blue crayon, but other colors can also work.
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Details
2 crayons per pair
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We suggest students work in pairs. Homeschool students can work on their own.
In this lesson, we discuss both the Celsius scale and Fahrenheit scale for measuring temperature. We mainly focus on Fahrenheit because students in the United States are more familiar with this temperature scale. We have Celsius worksheets available for the activity if you would like to use that temperature scale instead.
Student slideshow: English | Spanish
Teacher printout: English & Spanish
In this reading, students learn that seasons look different in different places.
Language Arts Activity: Writing About the Weather
Have your students write about daily weather in the form of a descriptive weather report. Help them with their vocabulary by creating a Weather Word Bank. If you need some inspiration, check out Bryn Donovan’s Master List for Describing Weather.
Writing about the weather–in poetry or a personal account—gives students an opportunity to expand their vocabulary and practice descriptive writing.
Read a Real Thermometer
Give your students a chance to practice their thermometer reading skills in the real world. Hang an inexpensive weather thermometer outside your classroom. Have your class can track how the temperature changes over the course of a day, a month, or even the school year.
You can also create a practice thermometer using paper, straws, and pipe cleaners. You can find instructions on how to construct one here!
Look for Weather Patterns
Keeping a weather journal can help your students observe and identify patterns in your local weather. If your class has kept a weather journal before, use their new understanding of weather data to take the activity to a new level. Involve students in decisions about their weather journal with these questions:
You can also use fun and free weather tracking printables for this activity!
You can elaborate student learning and engagement with Mystery Science mini-lessons.
If you are in an NGSS state, this mini-lesson supports the DCI ESS2.D: Weather and Climate
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