Precipitation Towers: Modeling Weather Data

• In this lesson, students will examine precipitation data in various American cities, how storms move around the world, and the negative impacts of extreme precipitation.
• Students will engage in a classroom activity that involves stacking cubes and pattern recognition, videos that delve into the implications of extreme precipitation, and an assessment that gauges their comprehension of the lesson's material.

Positives

• This lesson does not require an extensive amount of materials.
• This lesson provides many opportunities for extension, such as describing large frontal storm formation, the drought classification system, and the importance of precise precipitation data.
  

Additional Prerequisites

• This lesson has a "background" section about precipitation for educators to deepen their understanding.
• Students should understand precipitation, how to use models to represent data, and how to analyze and compare bar graphs.

Differentiation

• This lesson can fit within a larger unit on how climate change impacts precipitation/seasonal patterns.
• Some elements of this lesson are better suited for older students, such as researching precipitation data.
• Students can look at and graph the precipitation data of their community, independently or as a whole class, and compare the data to that of other cities.
• Classes can choose one city and graph the annual average precipitation data and look for trends.
• This lesson can support a classroom discussion about seasonal weather patterns that students have noticed in their community.
  

This resource is from the CLEAN collection. “The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness.”

This resource addresses the listed standards. To fully meet standards, search for more related resources.