Learn about the weather. Respond safely when it threatens.
The purpose of this site is to provide links to and reviews of some of the existing weather science and safety educational resources for teachers who instruct students in the kindergarten through eighth grades..
A needs assessment of educators in the state of Georgia indicated that many teachers wanted additional educational materials to use with their students to teach them about weather science and safety. In addition, because many K-8 classrooms are self-contained, teachers may not have had extensive experience with science instruction, or particularly with instruction in weather science and safety.
An excellent resource for teaching K-8 students about weather science and safety, along with other natural hazards, is the American Red Cross Masters of Disaster (MoD) curriculum. We have used the Masters of Disaster to teach teachers about weather science and safety in a series of weeklong workshops in 2008-2010 at the University of Georgia. With National Science Foundation funding in 2011 and 2012, we delivered the workshops to teachers in climatologically and socioeconomically vulnerable counties in Georgia. We learned from these workshops that in addition to teachers becoming more knowledgeable about weather and weather safety, they experience greater science teaching self-efficacy. The results of our initial use of the MoD curriculum with Georgia teachers appears in the Journal of Geoscience Education . Additional benefits were that instruction with the MoD helped students to learn about lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods. Delivery of the MoD curriculum to students also helped the students’ families to develop safety plans for how to deal with severe weather. Our most recent research on the use of the MoD curriculum with students and their families can be found in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Local chapters of the American Red Cross distribute the MoD curriculum. There is a version for teachers as well as for parents for use with home-based instruction. Local Red Cross chapters can be located here.
The links on this site describe some of our efforts to disseminate the MoD and the outcomes of those efforts. We also provide alignments of the MoD with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Interesting book-based resources are provided on various weather phenomena according to grade-level. We also provide some links to interesting online resources and videos that illustrate the causes and effects of various weather phenomena.
