Kelly Lamp, Abby Lewis, Ronie Daniels

CoRe Teaching Plans

What core ideas do you
intend students to learn?
(Link to NGSS Disciplinary
CoRe Ideas)

Why is it important for

students to learn this
concept? (Rationale)

What do YOU know about

this topic and its
importance?

What do you expect

students be able to do as a
result of your instruction?
(Link to NGSS Performance
Expectation)
What difficulties do you
anticipate students will
have?

What specific activities and

experiences could you use
to help students learn?
(Should engage students in
the NGSS scientific
practices)

Earth Systems CoRe Lab (Final)

3-ESS2-1 Earth's Systems

3-ESS2-1.-Represent data in tables and graphical displays to describe typical weather
conditions expected during a particular season. [Clarification Statement: Examples of
data could include average temperature, precipitation, and wind direction.]
[Assessment Boundary: Assessment of graphical displays is limited to pictographs
and bar graphs. Assessment does not include climate change.]
3-ESS2-2 Earth's Systems
3-ESS2-2.- Obtain and combine information to describe climates in different regions
of the world.
It is important for students, as growing members of society, to know how to do, read
,and understand weather concepts. Anyone can watch the news but not everyone
fully understands the concepts that are shown on their television screens. Also, it's
important for students to be able to make predictions about the weather after
observing patterns of weather across different times and areas. We want our
students to leave the lesson with a greater knowledge and understanding about
weather concepts, what they mean, and how to use them in their daily lives
We all learned from an early age the importance of weather concepts and have
realized that its a day-to-day issue. We are continuously reinforced through our
knowledge because we are exposed to weather changes each day. We know that
knowledge of weather concepts helps us in about every aspect of our lives, so
learning these ideas makes us well-rounded members of society.
We know what the difference between weather and climate are, what each different
type of weather means and what it does, we know different tools that are used for
measuring the weather, and we know how it applies to our daily lives.
1. Be able to read a thermometer
2. Be able to recognize and understand different vocabulary terms relating to
weather
3. Have an visual understanding of how tornadoes work
Students may have a hard time reading the thermometer and rounding between
different temperatures. We are mostly worried about the mathematical portion of
this lesson. We are also concerned with the students abilities to estimate what the
temperatures will be like in different places because they do not have a solid grasp
on what the difference in temperatures truly means. We believe that the students
will come to us with some prior knowledge about weather and climate concepts, but
we are worried about the misconceptions that they may have and are anticipating
some difficulties in correcting these misconceptions.
First, we will have the children practice reading a thermometer while offering
assistance when needed. To start off our presentation we asked questions such as: "
Do you know what a thermometer is? How do you read it? What does it measure?
What is the freezing point? What do the F and C stand for? What are Fahrenheit and
Celsius?" We used these questions to probe the students prior understanding and
these questions lead us into a discussion about thermometers and the practice that
goes along with the use of these tools.
After asking these questions and discussing how thermometers work we allowed the
students to pick 5 different places near the stem lab where they wanted to place the
thermometer and measure the temperatures. Before putting the thermometers in
their designated positions, we allowed our students to guess what each temperature
would be. At the very end of our lesson we went and grabbed each thermometer
and compared the temperature with our initial guess and discussed why we thought

Kelly Lamp, Abby Lewis, Ronie Daniels

Earth Systems CoRe Lab (Final)

the temperature increased or decreased. This activity allowed the students to make
scientific predictions and then go back to find results and analyze/make sense of
what they discovered.
Secondly, we will discuss what a tornado is by asking the following questions: "Do
you know what a tornado is? Do you know where tornadoes normally occur? How
would stay safe during a tornado? Do you know the difference between a tornado
watch and a tornado warning? What happens outside during a tornado?"
Furthermore, we discussed how a tornado is a part of the earth system and weather
creates the conditions for a tornado to happen. We discussed how tornadoes
happen on land and in the US, while hurricanes happen in the ocean. Leading from
this question we made a final point to explain how different regions of the world
have different climates.
We also read about tornadoes from a book entitled "I Wonder Why The Wind
Blows," to help us explain what a tornado is in further detail. We used this as a way
to probe the students about their thoughts and knowledge of tornadoes. This trade
book also allowed the students to see pictures and visuals of tornadoes so that they
have something to connect the new information with. We connected these thought
in an activity where the students got to simulate a tornado using 2, 2 liter plastic
bottles full of water and glitter. The glitter represented the debris a tornado carries;
having this glitter in the bottle helped us to further explain how a tornado picks up
everything in it's path.
Next, we played a game of bingo! Before started this game we went over the
definitions of the following terms: thermometer, cloud thunderstorm, lightning,
snow, cloud, sun, temperature, forecast, meteorologist, weather, climate, front, rain
gauge, and wind. We had a large poster board with all of the terms and graphics
which allowed the students to connect the terms with a picture in their mind. After
going over these terms we gave each student an individual bingo board and called
out the definitions one by one. When the students heard the definition for a word on
their board they covered it with a piece of paper. Before beginning the game we
made sure to clarify that all of the student understand that they had to cover four in
a row, column, or diagonally. This bingo game allowed us to formally assess the
students' knowledge and understanding of weather and climate.

The last activity we did allowed the students to look on an iPad weather app at cities
from all over the world. We purposely bookmarked cities in the north, south, east,
and west so that he temperatures and climates differed. This lead us to ask the
students questions such as Do you know where this is located? What is the
temperature there? What time is it there? What does it feel like outside? What does
the weather forecast for Sunday look like? etc. This activity was very discussion
oriented with the aid of technology. We were even able to allow the students to look
up additional locations with the extra time we had at the end of the lesson.
In what ways would you
assess students
understanding or
confusion?

Bingo will help us assess what the students understand because we will ask them
question through out the game. Moreover, This will be a formal assessment because
the kids will need to know the definitions of the terms we discussed in order to know
if they won the bingo game or not.
Throughout the entire lesson we kept up a conversation and a discussion based
environment that allowed us to constantly monitor the students understandings
and confusions so we could address them right away. We believe that this idea of

Kelly Lamp, Abby Lewis, Ronie Daniels

Earth Systems CoRe Lab (Final)

using formative assessment throughout the lesson allowed us to better gauge the
students understanding and therefore we were able to teach them in a more
effective way.
7. What materials/
equipment are needed to
teach the lesson?

- A thermometer
- red marker or crayon
- worksheet
- 2 2-liter bottles
- water
- duct tape
- poster board or paper (chips for the bingo game)
- bingo sheets
- iPads for the weather app

8. References (Please list

all resources consulted in
developing this form)

Weather Wizkids
Pinterest
I Wonder Why the Wind Blows Trade book