Brief Description Objectives Materials and Resources Activity Description

• Grade level: Upper elementary and middle school.

• Subject Area: Science, Language Arts

Brief Description

    This lesson involves students writing - individually or in small groups - a research report on their severe weather pattern for presentation to the class (lesson 5). As with any collaborative project, activities can be assigned to or divided among students in a variety of ways - from having some students write specific parts of the report to having everyone work together on entire the report. In addition, students will peer edit other student's work.
Objectives

    Students will:

• Practice writing skills through the processes of writing and revising their reports.
• Synthesize their understanding of the concepts of severe weather.
• Give parents and community members the opportunity to view and share students' work.

    In developing our lessons and activities, we made some assumptions about the hardware and software that would be available in the classroom for teachers who visit the LETSNet Website. We assume that teachers using our Internet-based lessons or activities have a computer (PC or Macintosh) with the necessary hardware components (mouse, keyboard, and monitor) as well as software (operating system, TCP/IP software, networking or dial-up software, e-mail and a World Wide Web client program, preferably Netscape, but perhaps Mosaic or Lynx). In the section below, we specify any "special" hardware or software requirements for a lesson or activity (in addition to those described above) and the level of Internet access required to do the activity.

1. Special hardware requirements: none.
2. Special software requirements: none.
3. Internet access: none.

• Students create rough drafts of their severe weather reports. These reports should include data gathered from the Internet such as where the severe weather pattern normally occurs (geographic location), under what conditions it forms, how it moves (how fast, in what directions, etc.), what type of damage it can cause, how it can be predicted, what steps can be taken to prepare for it, and how basic weather measurements are used to predict occurrences of this pattern (e.g., changes in temperature, wind, pressure, etc.).

• Students pair up to peer-edit each other's drafts prior to teacher editing.

• Students create final drafts, incorporating comments from their peer-editor and teacher.

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