Weather around the World ideas (Year 3)
Objective: To find out about weather conditions around the world
Activity: List what things you would need to take on holiday to a hot or cold place. Display a list of key vocabulary on a mind map: climate, hot, cold, dry, wet, tropical, desert, temperate, polar. Ask the children to define these words with pictures.
Objective: To discuss the effect of weather on human activity
Activity: Using an interactive world map, brainstorm where children have been on holiday. Then ask them to place the correct weather symbols on their holiday destination.
Objective: To ask and respond to geographical questions; to use geographical vocabulary
Activity: Let the children create a posed digital picture of themselves in their chosen ‘location’. For example, if a child has chosen Paris, they have to create a Parisian background and position.
Objective: To find out about weather conditions around the world
Activity: Using the weather reports in national newspapers, ask the children to prepare a weather report about a chosen destination.
Acting out weather reports can be an amusing way to enable children to learn. Providing a few ‘weather person’ props, and writing frames for weather reports for the children to use, will spice up a lesson no end. Also, make use of the weather folders on interactive whiteboard software.
Objective: To investigate places
Activity: Ask the children to fill in a ‘passport’, including information on place, country, continent and climatic zone. More able children can be encouraged to find out details such as population and flags. This will encourage them to use atlases and maps to look up information.
Ask the children to plan a picture map to illustrate the types of transport they would have to use to travel from their house to Paris. This can be done on a page of A3. Ask them to draw their house, followed by a picture of a bus, a train, an aeroplane, and so on. Other pictures can be added along the way, such as landmarks of things they might pass.
Websites:
www.bbc.co.uk/weather/bbcweather/weather_forecast_media.shtml - watch weather reports
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/onelife/travel/index.shtml?atoz#topics - access facts, including currency, languages and weather graphs
[from Junior Education, April 2006, p.52-53]
http://www.tes.co.uk/section/staffroom/thread.aspx?story_id=2194575&path=/Primary/&messagePage=1
More ideas from TES forum about how to make this topic interesting.
