Arctic Wednesdays Week 5: Pre-Trip Blog

 

Alison Buthlay

3rd Grade Teacher

Estabrook Elementary School, Lexington MA

 

            Down in our third grade classrooms in Lexington, MA we launch our science and social studies curriculum for the year with a combined unit exploring weather, climate, and the history of the Wampanoag people. After learning about what a weather forecast is our kids are armed with weather tools including thermometers, wind vanes, a rain gauge, an anemometer and a Beaufort Scale. For the first time the abstract ideas of measuring weather become concrete for them and they are always so enthusiastic.

It’s during this unit that they start to realize just how important the weather and climate are to our daily lives. They reflect on the ways our ever-changing New England weather has pushed the people who live here to be flexible and innovative with our food, homes, and clothing for thousands of years. Since then we have been tracking the weather every day, recording the sky conditions on a school bulletin board and graphing average high and low temperatures on the same bulletin board.

This trip will bring this real-world connection to a whole new level. Showing my students a video of the extreme weather atop Mt. Washington left them gasping and laughing at how intense the winds and snow were. Eyes-wide, they started grilling me about all the gear I would need and how the weather researchers could even stand to live there. They are also endlessly curious about Nimbus the weather cat!