Teaching Weather to ESL Students

Teaching Weather to ESL Students

Proficiency: Basic level of English proficiency

Grade Level: Ninth -- early high school/late junior high

Language arts (English), earth science, social sciences, and information technology

Lesson Objective: Students will create a five-day weather forecast based on the local news with comfort, making use of targeted vocabulary, grammatical constructions involving verbs as well as nouns relating to weather, and scientific concepts related to meteorology

Students will gain a greater proficiency accessing information, expressing their ideas on a basic conversational topic (weather) and become better able to work collectively in groups and to communicate in English between members of a team to produce a final media-related project

Materials: Tape of local news weather segment, newspaper, and recording camera if school has access to audio materials, and 'props' including a large table, a map, or any others depending on student creativity

Steps: First, the teacher will show a taped segment of a five-day forecast of the week's upcoming weather from a local news show. The teacher will engage in a short class discussion to prompt the students to express that they understand the weather, as expressed by the newscaster, and write the vocabulary words on the board. With a more advanced class, some more advanced science vocabulary and reasons for the weather can be discussed, such as seasonal averages and the effects of temperatures.

Next, the teacher will give the assignment. The teacher will distribute the weather pages of various newspapers to the class. The class must create a weather show. The class must use the weather vocabulary generated from the discussion in the show. The class must select, amongst themselves who will be the weather people -- perhaps two or three. The forecast for every day of the school week will be given. For instance -- Monday: Sunny and breezy. Tuesday: Rainy. Etc. Then, the other students will have to represent the weather. For instance, for a nice day, the students must actively demonstrate what they could do on a warm, sunny winter day -- such as go jogging, shovel melting snow, etc. or, on a rainy day, students could demonstrate staying inside, doing chores or crafts, catching up on homework while talking to friends over the phone or the computer, and so on.

Every weather day must also contain a reference to a different verb or activity as well as noun. For instance, one can't just say, 'there will be sun,' one must also say, 'it is sunny, so it is a good day to take a walk outside.' These illustrations of activities should include short conversations to reinforce vocabulary like, 'it's so warm in here, but it is so cold outside!' With students with a higher level of English proficiency, they might include things like how to stay safe in very cold or icy weather, or how to stay cool in hot weather. Lastly, using the newspaper as a resource, at the end of the broadcast, students could bring up an unusual weather event somewhere around the world -- such as a hurricane or an earthquake, and the reasons that this event occurs.