My students are learning about weather and a few years ago one of my awesome students gifted me with the book, Extreme Weather (seen above) and I have to say that this book is an absolute treasure! The book provides beautiful visuals on tricky weather concepts and my students can't wait to get their hands on this book! What I did was make a few copies of each page so that I could distribute them. I allowed the students to choose partners (I must have been in a tremendously good mood! ;) ) and then I gave each group a different page that had a particular topic ranging from Hurricanes to Extreme Heat. (Which I did not let them choose, so my mood must not have been THAT good!) Since we are working on text features, each group (to be honest they ALL wanted the Auroras page for some reason) got busy recreating the pictures that related to the captions on their page. Here is an example of how the HURRICANES picture turned out.
Each page also had a main paragraph that described the particular type of extreme weather. The students worked on putting the information into their own words. I must admit, putting information into their own words has been a HUGE challenge. After modeling and modeling, this is still something my students need to work on...(weep) and some of the students still copied W.O.R.D. for W.O.R.D. This is definitely something I will continue to work on with them! Here is how the TORNADO page turned out.
Students actually cut apart the article so that they could glue the caption next to the corresponding picture that they drew. My students are such wonderful artists! I couldn't believe how great their pictures turned out! Here is an example on EXTREME HEAT! The students were really surprised to find out that extreme heat is a silent killer.
The BEST part of this assignment was that they were learning while collaborating and working together. At the end of the assignment, each group presented their poster on the document reader so that the others could hear how they became "experts" on their topic.
This is how the bulletin board turned out. They are so eye catching in our room!
If you would like to try this out with your students,
click on the link below to grab a copy of the project rubric.
How do your make learning weather fun for your students?
I use activities I found at http://monthbymonth.scholastic.com/teach.html. There is both a weather pdf and a clouds pdf. We like the analyze activity where they try to predict the movement of storms.
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