1 class periods of 45 minutes each
Large Groups
Thinking & Reasoning
The students will analyze temperature variations throughout the world by using computer graphing of select major national and international cities.
Newspaper or computer in classroom; Computer graphing program such as a spreadsheet (e.g. Microsoft Excel) or a word processing program; Printer
Students will need to have access to a daily newspaper clipping of selected cities and temperatures or direct access to a computer with an internet connection (www.citynet.com) to obtain the information.
Students will better understand climate regions by viewing the temperatures over an extended period of time.
Assign at least two cities to students such as one within the United States and one international. Students are to keep a daily log of their cities' high and low temperatures. This is best done on a month long time period. Enter all the data on a spreadsheet with the dates as rows and one column for the highs of the city and the next column for the lows of the city. You will have one spreadsheet for each city. Using a graphing program with the spreadsheet, draw a graph for each city and print (e.g. use chartwizard in Microsoft Excel).
Students can research more detailed information about the assigned cities by using the computer to access the internet and going to www.citynet.com.
After the students have printed out their graphs, they may write a paragraph explaining their data - How much of a temperature variation do you see? Explain. What do you expect the climate to be? Would you like to live there? Why/why not.