1C Geography - What is weather?

Lesson: Geography

Class: Year 1 - 1C Year: 2021 - 2022

Our topic for geography this term has been all about weather. The lines of enquiry included;

What is weather?  How does it affects our lives?  How does the weather changes through the seasons?     What activities and celebrations do we engage in throughout the seasons? Is the weather forcasts are reliable? What are the different weather symbols and what do they mean? How and why is the weather different around the world? How are both the Sahara Desert and the Antarctica both deserts when they are so different?

We used video footage and discussions to find out about the seasons; how they change and how they affect our lives. Drawing upon our knowledge and ideas, we created a seasons picture that included; activities, weather conditions, feelings such as (Winter - Christmas, Snow, cold, excitement, bare, freezing etc). Then we explored some famous artists impressions of weather conditions and discussed how the art made us feel, what seasons were being portrayed and how we could tell. 

We went outside to explore what the weather was like by using our observational skills. We looked around and found clues that would tell us what the conditions were like on a particular day. We looked at trees, grass, leaves and felt rocks to see if they were wet or dry. we gathered some of the items from the outdoors and used them to create a piece of art that inluded vocabulary to describe the weather such as, autumnal colours, tectures, feelings etc.  

We looked at how meteoroligists forecast the weather. We learned about wind speed and direction and how using a wind sock can measure this, cloud coverage is measured using an Oktas scale and rain fall is measured using a rain gauge. After all of this learning, we explored weather forcasts. Over the week, we looked out at the weather and recorded our observations, we then used the BBC weather forecast to compare and see if the forecast was reliable. We found that the only parts of the weather forecast that were slightly different from our observations were the temperature and the wind speed.

We then looked at maps of the world to explore what the weather was like in each of the countries. To enable us to do this, we needed to learn all about how to use a key. We really enjoyed this lesson and found out about why the weather differs depending on how close or far away from the equator the countries are.

Our final lesson was all about comparing the Sahara and the Antarctica. We found out that they have lots similarities AND differences! They are bothe deserts but one is hot and one is cold, one is covered in sand and one is covered in ice. They are both dry, both have storms and both have very few residents.