GLOBE Weather
Explore weather phenomena with GLOBE Weather! Developed to directly address Next Generation Science Standards, this FREE five-week curriculum unit is designed to help middle school students understand weather at local, regional, and global scales.
By using a storyline instructional approach, students progressively move through the lessons while exploring questions and discovering answers that lead to more questions and opportunities to learn more.
THE ELEMENTS OF GLOBE WEATHER
Anchor: An anchoring phenomenon about an unexpected extreme rainfall event prompts students to question how and why storms happen and allows students to relate the storm to their own experiences.
Three Learning Sequences: Utilizing a modified BSCS 5E instructional cycle (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate), with evaluation/assessments built into each of the phases, students are prompted to return and reconsider phenomena that they have learned about before.
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Learning Sequence 1: Students investigate short-lived, isolated storms, learning how and when they typically occur.
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Learning Sequence 2: Students progress to investigations of how air masses collide at fronts, which can cause stormy weather over a larger region and over many days.
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Learning Sequence 3: Students zoom out to explore how and why storms move around the world.
Culminating Task: Applying what they have learned through the curriculum to a new context, students investigate a winter storm.
Assessments: GLOBE Weather contains embedded pre-assessments, opportunities for formative assessments, summative assessments for each learning sequence, and a final assessment.
DOWNLOAD THE GLOBE WEATHER CURRICULUM
The GLOBE Weather Overview includes lesson-by-lesson overviews, NGSS connections, and tips on navigating the GLOBE Weather curriculum.
The Table of Contents outlines the structure of the curriculum sections. Each section of the curriculum is broken out to individually download the associated teaching guides, student activity sheets, assessments, PowerPoints, and extensions for how students can collect their own data using GLOBE protocols. Links to videos used in lessons are also included.
Download the entire curriculum as one document.
Please visit our Spanish and French landing pages for the translated versions of GLOBE Weather.
TESTIMONIALS FROM TEACHERS
"I really liked this phenomena-based approach. I have not used it before. The students enjoyed the time-lapse videos and then LOVED building their own thunderstorm simulation."
"GLOBE Weather is an excellent NGSS curriculum with analyzing data and drawing conclusions, observing science phenomenon, and constructing models."
"As a teacher with limited experiences in teaching weather authentically, I feel that this unit truly rounded out my knowledge as a teacher and is by far the best that I've seen."
"GLOBE Weather makes the students think about what they learned and actually be able to explain the concepts in their own words."
"I really think you guys hit this one out of the ballpark...the model idea tracker was clutch! This made sure all students got on the same page at specific points in the sequence. So many cross-cutting concepts were emphasized or introduced!"
"I think it is real, well thought out, sequential and flooded with NGSS science and math standards and practices."
"You can cover all aspects of weather with this unit. I loved being able to connect with other GLOBE teachers and having students make their own accounts for the app."
"The 3-D learning in this unit was top-notch! The emphasis on the developing and using models was done in such a way that really brought in metacognition I have not seen emphasized in other curricular materials."
"I especially appreciated the use of data and ways to analyze the data- it made data accessible to all students and the sequencing (before, during, after) approach provided a way for closely looking for patterns."