This article provides links to polar-themed arts and crafts activities.
This article features activity books and polar-themed children's literature for use in the elementary classroom.
This issue of the free online magazine, Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears, highlights ways to teach about the extremes in day and night and seasons in the Arctic and Antarctica. The targeted literacy skill is cause/effect relationships. Art and poetry are integrated through a study of the aurora.
This article assembles free resources from the Polar Patterns: Day, Night, and Seasons issue of the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears cyberzine into a unit outline based on the 5E learning cycle framework. Outlines are provided for Grades K-2 and 3-5.
This article highlights children's literature about day and night, seasons, the aurora, and cause and effect for use in the elementary classroom.
This article from Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle provides ideas on how school librarians can work with elementary teachers to teach about the Sun's impact on weather and climate. The author introduces the Standards for the 21st Century Learner, developed by the American Association of School Librarians. The author focuses on Standard 1, which calls for students to inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge through developing and refining questions, investigating answers, seeking divergent perspectives in information, and assessing whether the information found answers the questions posed. The free, online magazine draws its themes from the Seven Essential Principles of Climate Literacy, with each issue focusing on one of the seven principles.
This activity engages learners to investigate the impact of Earth's tilt and the angle of solar insolation as the reason for seasons by doing a series of hands-on activities that include scale models. Students plot the path of the Sun's apparent movement across the sky on two days separated by three months of time.
This is an excellent interactive simulation of the earth moving around the sun.
Reasons for the seasons (RFTS for short) is an interactive learning resource that leverages the popular Google Earth virtual globe. It is designed to help students and members of the public visualize and understand the multiple factors that influence Earth's seasons.
This lesson introduces the Native American tradition of seasonal rounds and also discusses the important connection between land, food, nutrition, and energy for Native American people in Oregon. Many tribes migrated seasonally, based on the food sources that were available in a given place at a given time. Tribes and smaller bands of Native people would often travel several hundred miles in a few weeks to get to the next food-gathering source in time.In this lesson, students will reflect on their own lives and the foods they eat throughout the year while also learning about the food traditions of Native American people in Oregon. This lesson will also help students understand the close connection that Native Americans in Oregon have with the land.
In this worksheet-based activity, students review global visualizations of incoming sunlight and surface temperature and discuss seasonal change. Students use the visualizations to support inquiry on the differences in seasonal change in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and how land and water absorb and release heat differently. The activity culminates in an argument about why one hemisphere experiences warmer summers although it receives less total solar energy.
The annual cycle of seasonal rounds for Native Americans in Oregon reflects the relationship theyshare with the land—a relationship that includes intimate knowledge of local ecosystems. Since time immemorial, Tribes in Oregon have carefully considered seasonal ecosystems and ecoregions, and this knowledge of soil, water, plants, and animals helped them survive. Native Americans in Oregon today continue to draw on traditional Indigenous knowledge to guide how they manage the parts of their ancestral homelands that remain in their care.In this lesson, students will use a systems-thinking approach to explore the components andprocesses of ecosystems as they consider how the seasonal rounds of Native American Tribes in Oregon reflect local ecosystems. Students will analyze a hypothetical and a local ecosystem by identifying abiotic and biotic components and their relationships and then consider how Native people in Oregon considered the local abiotic and biotic components of their seasonal ecosystemsin seasonal rounds. Students will also consider the impact of forced relocation to reservations. Prior to white settlement, most Tribes in Oregon moved seasonally throughout a vast region in a pattern based on the availability of foods. Students will consider habitats, natural resources, stability and change, and living and nonliving components of habitats.
Description:
Build a model of the Earth, with its spin-axis, and a lamp as the Sun to demonstrate the concept of seasons.
Goals
--Understanding why we have seasons and the cause of seasonal variation in temperature.
--Learning about how the Earth rotates on a tilted axis compared to its orbit around the Sun.
Learning Objectives
--Students learn about seasons by building a model of the Earth and the Sun, and investigating how sunlight hits the Northern and Southern Hemispheres during different seasons.
--Students explain that the same amount of light hitting the ground heats up a small area more than a large area
--Students show that the angle at which the sunlight hits the Earth influences how much the sunlight heats up the Earth.
Students demonstrate that the angle at which the sunlight hits the Earth is related to the tilt of the Earth’s rotational axis compared to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
An interactive that illustrates the relationships between the axial tilt of the Earth, latitude, and temperature. Several data sets (including temperature, Sun-Earth distance, daylight hours) can be generated.
The four seasons are familiar to most people: winter, spring, summer and fall. But why do we have the four seasons? What causes the change in weather throughout the year? In this seminar you will learn about the relationship between the seasons and the sun. You will apply your prior knowledge of the four seasons to come to an understanding of the sun’s effect on them. By the end of this seminar, you will be able to classify the four seasons based on the Earth’s position to the sun.Standards 3.3.4.A5Describe basic weather elements. Identify weather patterns over time.
An interactive simulation of Earth's seasonal dynamics that includes the axial tilt and other aspects of Earth's annual cycle. This is part of a larger lab from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln: http://astro.unl.edu/naap/motion1/motion1.html
In this activity you'll see how the sun's tilt on its axis changes the length of shadows. For example, why is your shadow longer in winter than in summer? It's easy to see the answer if you have a "sun" and an orbiting "earth" to demonstrate. Like many other ancient people, the ancient Chacoans used the annual changes in shadows to measure the passage of time and the change in seasons. You can too!
An original informational story about Sun's role in heating Earth's air, land, and water and Sun's connection to the seasons and weather. The story encourages young readers to observe Sun's impact on weather and the seasons and to make predictions about the weather. The story is available in separate versions for grades K-2 and 3-5 and as a downloadable, full-color pdf. The story is a feature of the free online magazine that focuses on the seven principles of climate literacy.
Why our closeness to the sun does not dictate the seasons. Created by Sal Khan.
This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions and Common Core literacy strategies to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary using the illustrated text, "The Stranger." This story uses a mixture of pictures and words to explore the idea of the changes of the seasons and the expected natural events that occur with it' colder weather, leaves changing color, Jack Frost and migration. Chris Van Allsburg walks a fine line between reality and fantasy to create a mystery about the identity of the stranger who will represent the seasonal change from summer to fall. The Houghton Mifflin authors identify the storyĺĺs theme as an allegory for autumn and the use of personification to make the association.