Please e-mail me at [email protected] if you have any questions.
1. Write letter to parents, teachers and other people that you know to request that they send you e-mail addresses of people they know in Texas who would be willing to participate in the project (participants send information to the class about major weather events that have happened in their part of the state).
2. While you are waiting for e-mail addresses to return to your classroom, have students use google.com to find Subject Matter Experts. We used this search engine to find NBC meteorologists. You could use any of the major television stations to find meteorologists.
3. Once your students have e-mail addresses of people who live throughout the state, teach a lesson on how to write an e-mail. I let my students use my account that the district provides. Students then may work in groups or individually to send the e-mails requesting information. We asked for a significant weather event that they remember happening in their area. We also asked for their thoughts on the event.
4. We sent the same request to the Subject Matter Experts and even the Governor of Texas. All were happy to reply to our request.
5. When an e-mail returns to the classroom, have students use the e-mail research sheet to help them determine what in the e-mail needs further study. Click here for the e-mail research sheet.
6. After students have researched the weather event, they are ready to make a web page to showcase their knowledge. (We were not able to create projects on all the weather events that were sent to us, but we did complete research on each weather event.) We used Netscape Composer and Microsoft Word. Any web page design application would work, as long as students can use it to show what they have recently learned.
7. A separate part of the project involves students conducting internet research on different cities in the four different regions in Texas. To have your students complete the web quest (which involves Internet research and product creation), click the link on the home page of the project. Click here to go directly to the web quest portion of the project.
The following is a list of Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills that were covered during this project:
- Geography- describe political, economic, and physical regions in Texas and the Western Hemisphere, describe how people in Texas adapt to and modify their environment
- Writing- conduct research and raise new questions for further investigation
- Writing- write to express, discover, record, develop, reflect on ideas, and problem solve
- Writing- compose letters
- Science, Technology, and Society- describe the impact of science and technology on life in Texas
- Social Studies Skills- apply critical thinking skills, communicate effectively, and use problem solving and decision making processes
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