What comes to mind when you think of weather? I hope clouds do. They influence many aspects of our weather. Today’s lesson was all about weather. Weather is the state of our atmosphere on a daily basis, and includes things like temperature, precipitation, changes in pressure and changes in moisture. Students experimented at 5 different stations where they looked at thunderstorms, thermometers, air pressure, air mass and air volume.
After discussing the difference between weather and climate (ask your student if they can explain it to you!), we talked about the components that influence weather: the atmosphere, heat and water. Once we covered each of these, we moved on to our work stations were students had the opportunity to observe first hand factors that influence weather. Students observed what a “thermal” is and created distinct warm and cold layers in water as a model for thunderstorm development, as well as creating a thermometer from an alcohol & water mixture. We also learned that air has mass with a balloon scale, air has volume with our funnel and flask experiment, and that air exerts pressure. Ask your students to show you the pencil and paper experiment we did to show the air pressure.
Additional Information:
To find out more about the different could types visit:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/meteorological-terms/cloud.htm
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