Cloud Study Week 2

The second week's activity was for the students to research and create a cloud classification system.  It was meant to be done as a Problem Based Learning exercise, but our kids did not do well with this approach at all.  The difficulty was that none of them were adept at extracting information from their book sources, so that only led to confusion when trying to pull things together as a group.  Ultimately I gave them each books to take home so that next week they could all bring back information they learn.

I have been looking for online resources for the kids to look at, too.  One of the best sites I have found is Windows to the Universe, which has a wealth of information for all fields of science. Their teacher resource section for Atmosphere and Weather has several activities relating to clouds.  It also has this nifty cloud viewer to print and use for classification.  We have decided to continue our co-op until the end of June so I can find some extension activities here if we finish the NASA packet.  The student page about clouds has a lot of great information for the kids to read.

Another site I got from Library of Books, Links and More: Crazy About Clouds was NOAA's JetStream--Online School for Weather section about clouds.  They have two interactive cloud charts (main page and classification page,) a pdf cloud observation log, and a cloud identification wheel to cut out and use.

Finally, I found a neat article about Luke Howard, the man who named the clouds.  It's from The Weather Notebook, a great resource from the Mt. Washington Observatory that is still available though stopped posting new material in 2005.

A site a just recently came across is NASA Virtual Skies.  This has all things aviation, from math, to physics, to weather, to technology.  It includes teacher resources as well.  I found great information on clouds including a chart of cloud map symbols.


Hopefully the kids will do a little better with the group dynamics once they all have some information under their belts.  I am going to read more about PBL from a teaching perspective to find some tips to encourage my students.

Cloud Investigation Day 1

We began our first day of our cloud study.  I described the scenario from the booklet and read the first section of the prerequisite knowledge.  Here they are in two groups doing the first activity: brainstorming.

The two kids in the foreground are the 5th graders while the other group has two 3rd graders and a 4th grader in it.  Even though the packet is designed for grades 5 through 8, the younger group is enjoying the process and understanding the material.


I then had all 10 kids in the kitchen for second activity--the cloud in a bottle demonstration.  The picture is from the night before when I was trying it out at home.  I should have taken a video so you could see how the cloud disappears when you squeeze the bottle (high pressure) and then reappears when you release it.

The next activity is three days of observations for cloud classification.

Cloud Study Beginning

We don't have that many weeks until our summer break and I wanted to finish up our year of earth science learning something related to weather.  I searched the NASA Educators web site and found four weather-related lesson plans for grades 5 through 8: Investigating the Climate System-Clouds, Weather, Wind, and Precipitation (you can see the links for the others from the Clouds link.)

The Clouds guide is 31 pages, though only pages 3 through 11 are student-related while the rest are for teachers.  The premise is that the students have been hired  as interns in the State Climatology Office and they need to investigate a letter written to them by a 3rd grader through a series of 5 activities.  Each activity is supposed to take around 45 minutes, so this guide alone should be enough to take our co-op to the summer.

I ordered some books about clouds and the water cycle to start us out, and I was excited to find one available by Jeanne Bendick, How to Make A Cloud. I got a couple of generic children's science books, but I found what look to be a couple of nice gems, too.