Daily Web Visits
Each morning we have quick presentations from the Internet. The class meteorologists give the first one from Weather Underground, which gives us our local forecast. Two students record the sunrise and sunset and the length of day on our learning calendar. Other students record the time the moon rose and set along with the moon’s phase. We read the maximum and minimum temperatures for the day and the whole class figures out the range. Wind direction and speed are also given on this site. At the end of the week, we graph the results.
We also have a class historian, who looks at history and current events on History Channel’s This Day in History and The New York Times’ The Learning Network. Certain students are chosen to quiz the class on what’s in the news that day.
All of these Web sites are bookmarked on our home page, and the students have their Internet accounts set up to come up to this page. Each class historian and meteorologist prints out their page, and we store them in a class book. The students can go back and look at the year’s weather and history in their spare time.