Weather Watch

The Weather Watch kit encourages students to get stuck into using equipment to measure weather conditions and gather data. It requires the facilitator to give a demonstration showing the proportions of available water on the earth, and provides a worksheet to guide students through comparing the rainforest and desert glasshouse plants.

• It is recommended that you spend an hour in class preparing students by looking at what makes up the weather, introducing the water cycle, and talking about why animals and plants need fresh drinking water.
• Good classroom follow-up activities to cement learning could include learning about where we get our water from in Dunedin, keeping weather journals, and learning more about plant adaptations in different environments.
• Please bring your own pens/pencils, and printed-out worksheets.

Related Curriculum Achievement Objectives:

Curriculum Level 4

• Mathematics and Statistics: Number Knowledge, Measurement
• Science: Nature of Science, Living World, Physical World, Planet Earth and Beyond
• Technology: Technological Products, Characteristics of Technology

Learning Outcomes:

• Use specialised instruments to measure aspects of the physical environment
• Appreciate that these instruments make use of physical phenomena to obtain these measurements
• Start to understand the basic water cycle and memorise some related terms
• Appreciate how small the amount of accessible freshwater water is compared to the entire Earth's water - Compare the adaptions of plants in two different environments, one very wet and one very dry

Physical Resources:

• 1x spirit thermometer
• 1x dial thermometer
• 1x anemometer
• 1x wind vane
• 1x rain gauge
• 1x psychrometer
• 1x barometer
• 5x A3 Water Cycle diagrams
• 35x water droplet counters.
• 1x Bucket, bottle, glass, teaspoon.
• 15x Clipboards (shared between kits)
• 1x reference sheets for facilitators