WORKSHOPS and SPECIAL PROGRAMMING:
WEATHER and CLIMATE BASICS for 3rd and 6th GRADES
When I walked into the classroom at the University of Wisconsin – Fox Valley in the Fall of 2009 where I was going to be teaching weather for the first time I was nervous! I was nervous because not only had I never taught weather before but I also really didn’t have any particular interest in teaching it! As a geographer, who had been teaching physical geography for about 15 years I had continued to innovate in different ways of teaching climate. I was also, however, very comfortable with the patterns of temperature, precipitation, pressure and winds that were strongly correlated with changes in the location of the “subsolar point” (i.e., the latitude at which the Sun is directly overhead at noon depicted in “analemma” in photo above) that occurred during Earth’s annual revolution around the Sun.
But weather was very foreign to me. I was also uncomfortable with the shorter and less predictable time scales as well as smaller geographic scales. As luck would have it, however, my predecessor, Dr. Jim Brey, was a meteorologist who was leaving his teaching position to become the new Education Director at the American Meteorological Society (AMS)! He left with me very high quality text books and lab manuals that I quickly dove into while also learning to use something else very new: Real-time weather web sites. Real-time web sites were actually not completely new to me; I had used real-time stream data from the U.S. Geological Survey for many years with great success. But real-time weather web sites were new.
But the beauty of using them quickly became apparent with the biggest reason being that one could correlate what was happening outside (e.g., increased wind speed, a dramatic drop in temperature, the development of precipitation) with data in a variety of forms including maps and diagrams. To me this was especially exciting because ever since my first years of teaching as a graduate student at Indiana University-Bloomington I always had a strong interest in relating what we were doing in class to easily observable phenomena. Over the years, however, as I have continued to teach weather I have broadened my use of real-time weather web sites beyond those easily available through the AMS to include sources such as NOAA's National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center (SPC) and the Wyoming Weather Web.
Circle of Illumination Science Education invites school districts across Michigan and elsewhere in the Upper Midwest to provide a unique professional development opportunity for third and sixth grade teachers which will enable them to gain deep content mastery of large-scale climatic processes as well as more local and regional processes associated with weather as well as possible interactions between them. This training will be available in a series of workshops to be offered starting in late March 2024. A variety of web-based resources will be used including many real-time weather web sites. Participants in workshops will be able to obtain CEUs or SCECHES (specific to Michigan).
Please contact Dr. Lilienfeld at amy@circleofillumination.com for more details, possible dates as well as pricing.
But weather was very foreign to me. I was also uncomfortable with the shorter and less predictable time scales as well as smaller geographic scales. As luck would have it, however, my predecessor, Dr. Jim Brey, was a meteorologist who was leaving his teaching position to become the new Education Director at the American Meteorological Society (AMS)! He left with me very high quality text books and lab manuals that I quickly dove into while also learning to use something else very new: Real-time weather web sites. Real-time web sites were actually not completely new to me; I had used real-time stream data from the U.S. Geological Survey for many years with great success. But real-time weather web sites were new.
But the beauty of using them quickly became apparent with the biggest reason being that one could correlate what was happening outside (e.g., increased wind speed, a dramatic drop in temperature, the development of precipitation) with data in a variety of forms including maps and diagrams. To me this was especially exciting because ever since my first years of teaching as a graduate student at Indiana University-Bloomington I always had a strong interest in relating what we were doing in class to easily observable phenomena. Over the years, however, as I have continued to teach weather I have broadened my use of real-time weather web sites beyond those easily available through the AMS to include sources such as NOAA's National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center (SPC) and the Wyoming Weather Web.
Circle of Illumination Science Education invites school districts across Michigan and elsewhere in the Upper Midwest to provide a unique professional development opportunity for third and sixth grade teachers which will enable them to gain deep content mastery of large-scale climatic processes as well as more local and regional processes associated with weather as well as possible interactions between them. This training will be available in a series of workshops to be offered starting in late March 2024. A variety of web-based resources will be used including many real-time weather web sites. Participants in workshops will be able to obtain CEUs or SCECHES (specific to Michigan).
Please contact Dr. Lilienfeld at amy@circleofillumination.com for more details, possible dates as well as pricing.