Tuesday, March 6, 2007

A Warm Winter

We have had a unbelievably warm winter here in Hungary. In the United States it is a bit of a different story. I have been talking about this with my students the past few months. When is it going to snow? Is the winter in Hungary always this warm? Do you like this weather?

I brought in some pictures from Winter in Wisconsin, since that is where I am from it worked well. I had my family send me some winter photos. Some were of shoveling, snowman making, and just playing in the snow. We took some minutes to describe and discuss the photos. Since many of them contained my family members the discussion took several turns, but was fairly successful.

I then broke the students into several small groups of two to three. I made a poster that says

KEEP COOL!!
In 1917, Death Valley, California, reported temperatures over 120 degrees F, and 49 degrees C for forty-three consecutive days.
Here I included photos of Death Valley, California, and left space for my winter photos. As we discussed both we put them on the poster and compared and contrasted the differences.
List all of the things you would do to keep cool were you living in Death Valley.(Have students discuss together for about 5 to 10 minutes)
Again we discussed and groups took turns telling what they would do until we reached 15 ideas.
In another column, I had:
List all of the things you would do to keep warm in Wisconsin. (Again have students discuss in their groups)
**If you have a fast group you can further compare and contrast. As I have primary students this took the whole lesson, plus we got super side tracked as we talked about the snow in Wisconsin. My students all had to tell me stories of a snow adventure which they once encountered, but that is half the fun of teaching!!!

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