Winter Weather Teaching Box | UCAR Center for Science Education

Winter Weather Teaching Box Winter weather may cancel school, but it’s also an opportunity to learn science. This teaching box is filled with hands-on activities that get primary grade students to learn the science of winter weather including concepts of earth science. Explore the educational resources in this teaching box and bring snow and ice into your classroom!

Teaching Boxes are collections of classroom-ready and standards-aligned activities, content, and multimedia that build student understanding of science, technology, engineering, and math.

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Overview

The UCAR Center for Science Education Teaching Boxes are themed collections of classroom-ready educational resources to build student understanding of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Resources highlighted within teaching boxes are from various science education programs and all have been vetted by our education team.

Topic: Winter Weather
Level: Primary grades (K-2)
How to use this resource: Each tab correlates with a part of the scope and sequence for this topic and includes links to hands-on activities, background content, and multimedia resources. Select resources within each tab that are best suited for your students to meet the learning goals. (There are often more resources linked within each section than you will need.)
Printable version of this overview (PDF)

Keeping warm

Girl dressed in snow clothing standing next to a snowbank Goal: Students learn how people and wildlife keep warm during cold winter weather.

Activity: Students explore how people dress for cold and how wildlife is adapted to keep warm during winter.

Performance Expectation: K-LS1-1. Students use observations to describe patterns of what animals (including humans) need to survive cold winter weather.

Standards:

NGSS Science and Engineering Practices: Analysing and interpreting data; obtaining, evaluating and communicating information
NGSS DCI: LS1A Structure and fuction
NGSS Crosscutting themes: Cause and effect
National Geography Standards: 15 How Physical Systems Affect Human Systems (3. People adapt to the conditions of the physical environment)

Snowflake shapes

Snowflake under a microscope Goal: Students learn that snowflakes come in different shapes.

Activity: Students investigate the shapes of snowflakes.

Performance Expectation: K-ESS2-1. Students make observations of snowflakes over time and describe the shape variations in a graphic.

Standards:

NGSS Science and Engineering Practices: Analyzing data
NGSS DCI: ESS2.D Weather and climate
NGSS Crosscutting themes: Patterns

Colors of snow

Snowy field in front of a mountain Goal: Students learn that snow can be various shades, but is usually light in color, which reflects most of the sunlight that hits it unlike darker materials.

Activity: Students explore the colors of snow as represented by artists, explore how different colors absorb and reflect sunlight, and predict what would happen if snow and ice were covered by a layer of dark soot or dirt.

Performance Expectation: K-PS3-1. Make observations to determine the effect of sunlight on Earth’s surface.

Standards:

NGSS Science and Engineering Practices: Planning and carrying out investigations
NGSS DCI: PS3.B Conservation of energy and energy transfer
NGSS Crosscutting themes: Cause and effect

Water and ice

A creek surrounded by snowy trees Goal: Students learn that water can be a solid or a liquid depending on temperature.

Activity: Students read the book A Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats, experiment with water and ice, and consider where ice and snow is found on Earth.

Performance Expectation: 2-ESS2-3. Students obtain information to identify where water is found on earth and that it can be solid or liquid.

Standards:

NGSS Science and Engineering Practices: Obtaining, evaluating and communicating information
NGSS DCI: ESS2.C The roll of water in Earth's surface processes
NGSS Crosscutting themes: Patterns of the natural world

Keeping Warm

Goal: Students learn how people and wildlife keep warm during cold winter weather.

Engage students by having them consider that the clothes we wear help us stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

Dress for the Weather: This online interactive from PBS Learning Media allows students to play with dressing for different types of weather.
Dressing for the Seasons: This activity, from the Utah Education Network, gets kids to consider how to choose clothes depending on the temperature. To focus on winter weather, ask students specifically to dress the characters for cold and snow.

Explore with a student investigation of how wildlife is adapted to stay warm.

How Animals Stay Warm: This exploration from the New England Aquarium allows students to explore the role of fat as an insulator that helps marine mammals stay warm.
Animal Coverings: From the Utah Education Network, this activity allows students to explore different kinds of animal coverings and how each covering protects the animal or keeps it warm.
How Animals Prepare for Winter: Students learn that some animals migrate and others hibernate during the winter months in this activity from the Utah Education Network and Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears.

Evaluate student learning through pictures and questions.

Have students draw a picture of a cold winter day that includes people and wildlife that stay warm. Assess student ability to answer questions about how the people and other animals are staying warm. Watch out for common misconceptions about heat and insulation in student answers.

Performance Expectation and Standards:

PE: K-LS1-1. Students use observations to describe patterns of what animals (including humans) need to survive cold winter weather.
NGSS Science and Engineering Practices: Analyzing and interpreting data; obtaining, evaluating and communicating information
NGSS DCI: LS1A Structure and fuction
NGSS Crosscutting themes: Cause and effect
National Geography Standards: 15 How Physical Systems Affect Human Systems (3. People adapt to the conditions of the physical environment)

Snowflake Shapes

Goal: Students learn that snowflakes come in different shapes.

Engage students with the idea that snowflakes come in different shapes.

Have students look at snowflake photos in an online gallery Snow Crystals Online Gallery (snowcrystals.com), created by Kenneth G. Libbrecht, at Caltech

Explore snowflake shapes in depth.

Catching Snowflakes: If you are in a place where snow falls in winter, try catching snowflakes and having students take a close look.
Make a Flake: Students make a snowflake model based on images of real snowflakes.

Evaluate student learning by having students sort snowflakes and describe.

Print snowflakes at the Snow Crystals Online Gallery (snowcrystals.com) or Snowflake Images from NOAA and have students sort into categories based on shape. You can define the categories for students (such as rod-shaped and star-shaped) or have students come up with their own categories. Ask students why snowflakes have different shapes. Student answers should include that snowflakes are made of different arrangments of ice crystals which gives them different shapes. Student answers may include that different types of weather lead to different snowflakes.

Performance Expectation and Standards:

PE: K-ESS2-1. Students make observations of snowflakes over time and describe the shape variations in a graphic.
NGSS Science and Engineering Practices: Analyzing data
NGSS DCI: ESS2.D Weather and climate
NGSS Crosscutting themes: Patterns

Colors of Snow

Goal: Students learn that snow can be various shades but is usually light in color, which reflects most of the sunlight that hits it, unlike darker materials.

Engage the color of snow by looking at what colors artists have used to paint snow.

Is Snow White? Maybe, or Maybe Not includes an online gallery of landscape art that includes snow and shows what colors the artists used to paint the snow.

Explore students with an investigation about how different colors absorb heat.

Reflect on Light and Color: Take a look at how the color of materials that cover the Earth like snow, soil, and water affect the amounts of sunlight they reflect and absorb.
Do Different Colors Absorb Heat Differently: In this activity, from Teach Engineering, students learn that darker colors absorb more heat than lighter colors.

Evaluate student learning by having students predict what would happen if light snow was covered by something dark.

Ask students to predict what would happen in places where there is soot or dirt on top of snow and ice. Student responses should include that the darker color of soot or dirt on top of ice would absorb heat. It would warm up faster than light colored snow and ice.

Performance Expectation and Standards:

PE: K-PS3-1. Make observations to determine the effect of sunlight on Earth’s surface.
NGSS Science and Engineering Practices: Planning and carrying out investigations
NGSS DCI: PS3.B Conservation of energy and energy transfer
NGSS Crosscutting themes: Cause and effect

Water and Ice

Goal: Students learn that water can be a solid or a liquid depending on temperature.

Engage students with a story about a child discovering snow.

Read the book The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keatsand ask students what they think happened to the snowball in the story.
- Find the book in your library or show students a video read-aloud version of The Snowy Day (YouTube)

Explore by experimenting with changes in state between solid ice and liquid water.

Water Magicians: In this activity from Utah Education Network, students observe water changing states from a solid to a liquid to a gas. To keep the focus on a comparison of ice and liquid water, omit the evaporation part of the activity and emphasize the different in temperature as above freezing or below freezing.
Snow vs. Water: On a snowy day, have students compare the volume of snow to an equivalent volume of water in this simple activity from Teach Engineering that is similar to what the boy in The Snowy Day experiences as his snowball melts. Emphasize that what causes the change in state is temperature that is above freezing or below freezing.

Evaluate student learning by having students decide whether it would rain or snow at different temperatures.

Show photos of landscapes that have snow and ice and those that have liquid water (rain, rivers, etc). Have students mark whether each scene is above freezing or below freezing. Collect photos from magazines or the web, use your own photos, or use the Freezing Or Not presentation below.
Freezing or Not: Some of the eight photos in this Powerpoint presentation have snow and ice and some have liquid water. Have students mark whether each scene is above freezing or below freezing based on whether they see water or ice in the images. Print the last slide in the series for students to use as a worksheet to record their answers.

Performance Expectation and Standards:

PE: 2-ESS2-3. Students obtain information to identify where water is found on earth and that it can be solid or liquid.
NGSS Science and Engineering Practices: Obtaining, evaluating and communicating information
NGSS DCI: ESS2.C The roll of water in Earth's surface processes
NGSS Crosscutting themes: Patterns of the natural world

Teacher Professional Development

Build your basic understanding of winter weather.

Snowstorms
Snowflakes
Blizzards
Icy Winter Weather
Albedo (Windows to the Universe)
Global, Seasonal Surface Albedos (NASA Earth Observatory)
Winter Weather Distance Learning Course (You’ll need to login to MetEd to see the course, but it’s free.)
Cold But Brief: UCAR science writer Bob Henson explains the polar vortex and how cold a cold snap can get.

Learn about current winter weather research from UCAR and NCAR.

Transportation and Winter Weather: The Research Applications Lab at the National Center for Atmospheric Research is working to help make travel in winter weather safer on the roads and in the skies. Below are links to videos and news stories about their research to inspire your teaching about winter weather.

Find more winter weather educational resources.

While Beyond Penguins and Polar Bearswas created to bring polar science to elementary education, it also includes educational resources that are useful for winter weather education too.
- Water, Ice, and Snow
- Keeping Warm
Learn about snow through conducting the GLOBE solid precipitation protocol (snow) and field guide.