Example Lesson #3: Social Studies-Investigating Climate

Teachers often face a problem of helping students connect what they know in mathematics with another content area like social studies. Students need assistance seeing how math concepts such as means, trends, and variation can be applied to a topic like climate.

This integrated lesson focuses on analyses of temperature and precipitation data for three different regions of the western United States. We put students in the role of buyers for outdoor recreation stores in these three regions as a way of anchoring their understanding. In addition to charting and analyzing historical data, we encourage you to have students use reference materials to conduct further research on the local climates of Seattle, Washington; Fairbanks, Alaska; and Phoenix, Arizona. This integrated lesson contains optional guidelines for using Microsoft's Encarta™ for this aspect of their work. At the conclusion of these lessons, students are expected to make recommendations on clothing and recreation items suitable for the outdoor store in each location.

Students begin their research by learning some basic ideas about climate. Teachers can do this by using social studies textbooks, reference materials, or Microsoft's Encarta™. Encarta contains a definition of climate, maps for locating the cities, articles about the cities and their geography, and a climate chart and table to compare the cities' weather. Schools that have on-line access to the internet can use Encarta as a starting point for Web searches and accessing data from local news organizations (e.g., television and radio stations).

Once students have completed the basic climate research, they will learn how to use spreadsheets to organize historical climate data into tables and charts to support their buyer's report. They will learn how to study the charts and interpret the data to make outdoor store buying decisions. Finally, we recommend that they make a presentation on their recommendations. Depending on teacher decision they can use word processing or presentation software such as Powerpoint™ to prepare and/or make their presentation.

The following lessons include ideas for teacher-led discussions and how to group students for different activities. You will also find student worksheets, information on how to use Encarta and its on-line options, and guides for preparing Excel charts.

We strongly suggest that you print out these materials and study them before you begin these multi-day integrated lessons on math and climate.

  

Materials	Your social studies text Optional: Encarta™ Student access to internet Weather section from newspapers
Files to Use Download Info/Instructions	gridport.doc gridland.doc guides.doc climchrt.doc wthrclim.doc encwkst.doc citycomp.doc seattle.xls phoenix.xls fairbanks.xls seaexcht.xls

 

Step 1: Problem Identification and Clarification

This integrated lesson depends on an initial understanding of some basic terms (e.g., weather, climate), and how climate affects a region of the country. Therefore, we suggest that you begin by reviewing this information, which can be found in the file wthrclim.doc. This file contains a worksheet that students can complete, either by using their social studies textbook or Encarta. We have also included an optional worksheet that you can use if you have access to Encarta. This file is called encwkst.doc.

After covering the basic information on weather and climate, you need to make sure that students know that patterns of temperature and precipitation over time are critical if they are to understand the climate of a particular location. This understanding is central to the data analyses that they will be doing in Step 2. You may want to create some displays of temperature or precipitation over time for your region or city. A good deal of this data is available at http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/climsum.html. Make a chart (or draw one on the board) and discuss how the means, trends, and temperature or precipitation vary within the year or over years. Also, review the meaning of these concepts.

Next steps. For the remainder of this project, we suggest that you break the class into teams of buyers for an outdoor/recreation chain store. There should be a team for each city (i.e., Phoenix, Seattle, and Fairbanks).

In order that students have a good understanding of their roles as store buyers, you may need to discuss some of the following questions.

• What is a buyer's job? What do they do for the store?
• What type of items are normally carried by these companies? (You may need sample catalogs from REI, Land's End, L.L Bean to facilitate this step.)
• How far in advance do you think they must place their orders? (Most buyers place orders at least six months before the start of a season. Therefore they have to use historical climate data for decision making.)
• Why might a buyer pay attention to climate data?
• Would buyers use just the current weather, one year's data, or climate over time?

Once students understand their role as a buyer, they can be assigned the following task. They will need to use the climate data for one of the three cities (seattle.xls, phoenix.xls, fairbanks.xls). Instruct the students that the boss at their store has asked you to prepare a plan that includes the following information:

• Outdoor and outwear clothing recommendations for the summer and winter season
• Sporting good recommendations for the summer and winter seasons
• Supporting climate data
• Charts of the mean high and low temperatures for a five-year period
• Charts of the mean precipitation for a five-year period
• Average of all the means for high temperatures and precipitation

Step 2: Analysis of the Information or Data

Once students have been assigned their roles as buyers for a city, they can begin selecting data and preparing tables and line charts with Excel. Fifty years of temperature and precipitation data can be found in fairbanks.xls, phoenix.xls, and seattle.xls.

We advise you to restrict the number of years that students will use to analyze temperature and precipitation for a particular city. Clearly, creating a line chart with all 50 years of data would be impossible to read and interpret. We have found that 5 years of data are sufficient. Make sure that the students are all using the same 5 year period of time (e.g., 1992-96). This will make comparisons between the cities less confusing. You will find examples of charts for 5 years of temperature and precipitation for Seattle (1950-54) in the file seaexcht.xls. This file shows many different kinds of charts that you can create to display data. Instructions for making these kinds of charts is in climchrt.doc.

Have the student teams create temperature and precipitation charts for the 5 year period for their city. You can make transparencies of these charts to use as a basis for class discussions. Also, you can have them complete the city comparison worksheet prior to the next step (the classroom discussion). This worksheet can be found in the file citycomp.doc.

Class Discussion: Comparing the Charts

Students can use the transparencies for their cities to talk about patterns of temperature and precipitation for their city. The discussion will be richer if you have had the students research more information about their city as part of this exercise. You may want to post all the charts on the walls for additional discussion.

Teacher questions and discussion issues may include:

• The location of important information on each chart (months, temperature)
• The consistency or trends in the data over time from year to year
• Variations in the data (year-by-year or month-to-month)
• Do the lines for temperature and precipitation seem to follow a similar pattern?
• If you had an extreme monthly mean for a temperature did anything unusual also happen in the same year for precipitation?
• Why is the mean important in analyzing data?
• Obvious comparisons between temperatures and precipitation from city to city
• How a different climate would affect what an outdoor/recreation chain store would buy
• How stores might "swap" the same merchandise at different times of the year based on the another city's climate (e.g., summer equipment from Seattle in August could be sent to Phoenix).

Step 3: Clear Communication of the Results

Once students have collected, analyzed, and summarized their charts, they are ready to prepare their buyer's report. The emphasis needs to be on communicating their findings and recommendations to an authentic audience in a clear and concise manner. Use a text structure (e.g., problem-solution, cause and effect) or presentation style that is appropriate for this communication.

Remind each team that they need to prepare a buying plan for their store. The boss of each store has asked that your team's plan include the following:

• Outdoor and outwear clothing recommendations for the summer and winter season.
• Sporting good recommendations for the summer and winter seasons.
• Climate charts which help explain your choices.
• Charts of the mean high and low temperatures for a five-year period.
• Charts of the mean precipitation for a five-year period.
• Average of all the means for high temperatures and precipitation.

Optional Formats for the Report

• Teams can do an oral report using transparencies or posters.
• Use Powerpoint to make a brief presentation. This could include text, Excel charts, and even photographs of the region taken from the internet.
• A memo or written report (see Example 1: Donut Sales in the Integrated Lessons to get ideas for what a memo should look like)