EDUCATORS : The Teachers Guide

TEACHER'S GUIDE

The complete Guide will be placed here the middle of February beginning with the Opening Activities!

The PASSPORT TO WEATHER AND CLIMATE (PTW&C) Teacher's Guide closely follows the format of what's become a tried (by teachers) and true (reviewed by researchers) model over the previous 8 P2K Modules. Central to the Guide are hands-on Activities in which students explore the essential scientific principles behind weather and climate. There are several excellent resources already available that do something roughly similar for meteorology and earth science. So why this new Guide?

What's different about PTW&C?

First, and most importantly, we started our instructional materials development process with 3 inputs:
(a) the National Science Education Standards providing a checklist of the most important scientific principles and content knowledge;
(b) comments from working educators who have taught weather and climate about what they have found works in class, and
(c) an awareness of the possible real world connections we might broker by virtue of P2K's collaboration with NOAA and NASA, the nation's leading research agencies dealing with weather and climate. Example: we know that in the videos we'll be flying through hurricanes with NOAA's experts: that made an activity on building and testing "Hurricane Houses" all the more interesting to develop. We know we'll be seeing Doppler radar, and "Doppler on Wheels" vehicles studying tornadoes, and so a hands-on activity (see below) could tie in to real research projects.

Second, many so-called hands-on activities are really just pencil and paper research projects: PTK tries to embody some such research-and-write-up exercises within genuinely project-based discovery activities. For example, simulating Doppler radar in a shoebox using materials of different hardness precedes plotting the results on paper, or on the computer. When we say "hands-on" we mean hands on.

Third, wherever possible students will see the REAL-WORLD CONTEXT for the hands-on activities in the videos and have a chance to read about the researchers who explore these principles as a rewarding career online.

As Washington State teacher Jo Lynne Roberts says in the ABOUT P2K section of the website, "We often do too many hands-on activities without (exploring the) content. PASSPORT supplies the content." Says California teacher, Ginny Dexter, one of the Mentors providing online support for participants in LIVE FROM THE STORM, "I think that the main thing I like about being involved in this program is that my kids feel like they're doing science here and now, that this isn't coming from a textbook or a history book, that they're actually doing things live, they're doing things now, they're meeting real scientists, they're involved with children from around the world, and I think that that is beyond motivating for them."

Fourth and finally, P2K tries wherever possible to suggest interdisciplinary connections. Practice conversions by going between knots, miles and kilometers, millibars and inches of mercury, and then convert observations from the Internet into maps, transforming real world data into numbers. Get involved in "WRITING UP A STORM", or the "Great Emergency PSA Contest," and combine language arts with science. Explore the men and women behind the words we know (Who was Coriolis or Doppler? Why do we call the standard rating system for tornadoes the Fujita scale?) and create a weather and climate change timeline (since the history of discovery and invention is now emphasized in many state frameworks.) Lastly wrestle with social issues like shoreline development in hurricane-prone areas, and role play evacuation scenarios. We think any teacher will find more than enough tasty selections on this menu to serve up a healthy and nutritious feast!

The Guide is organized around 4 main themes: it's designed to work this year to support LIVE FROM THE STORM, and in the future as an "evergreen" resource:

The 4 sections are

WHAT MAKES EARTH'S WEATHER
"MAKING WEATHER" IN CLASS
RECORDING AND TRACKING WEATHER, and
WEATHER, CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

There's also a GETTING STARTED and a WRAP-UP section, suggestions for how to use all 3 media components most effectively, a glossary, MultiMedia bibliography and Standards-Activities Correlation sheet.

You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files below. The Reader is available for free.

Opening Activities
   A.1 Weather and Climate Facts and Fiction
        • Teacher Resource Sheet A.1.1
        • Teacher Resource Sheet A.1.1 Answer Key (To receive a copy of the answer key send a message to Eileen Bendixsen)
   A.2 KWL Chart
   A.3 Pre-test/Post-test
        • Copy Master A.3
        • Copy Master A.3 Answer Key (To receive a copy of the answer key send a message to Eileen Bendixsen)
   A.4 WEATHERLogs
        • Portfolio Assessment Summary Sheet
        • WEATHERLog Rubric

Closing Activities
• Student Worksheet Z.2

Glossary

Resources

Where required, copy masters of student worksheets will also be supplied.

The Guide is available online in PDF format, activity by activity. However as those of you who've used recent PTK projects such as LIVE FROM THE RAINFOREST and LIVE FROM THE SUN know, we try to make the printed Guides superior in design as well as content. "Teachers and students deserve the best." Yes, you can get all the above "free" on the Net, but we think you'll be even happier with your $35.00 order of the Guide, worksheets and an oversize full-color poster! Sometimes people equate "free" with valueless, and we sure hope no-one thinks that about this Guide!

If you have any questions about the Guide, please direct them to ptkinfo@passporttoknowledge.com