Summer Assignment

Here’s what I’ve asked my students to do over the summer in preparation for the first class session.

Please read Module 7 and 8 in your summer leisure. Students, do the study guide questions that correlate to those modules. I have study guide questions from the text for Module 7 and Module 8. You may print those and answer the questions. Parents, please correct study guides. 

Your summer lab project that connects to these modules is as follows:

I would like you to construct a 2 week study of the local weather.  The instructions are under Module Experiment 7, including a weather chart.  This is for you to fill out during the two weeks in the summer you choose to do this project. I am sending this out so that you can start on it now if you are vacationing in July, or you can let it go to July if you are vacationing now. I don’t want this to be a stressful thing. I just want you all to learn a bit about the weather and how to determine the weather by observing the clouds. 

This is something my father-in-law would do easily and he sought to teach his children the same. He was a meteorologist in WWII and easily showed us how weather changes daily and that patterns we see today where repeated in year past. These weather patterns aren’t always as extreme as the news would like to tell us, either. He also taught us how you can’t forecast the weather much beyond 24 hours.

I’d like to help you learn these skills during the summer when the clouds can change and pop up thunderstorms are more frequent. So, if you put a few tools of learning how to assess the weather in your toolbox you’ll be able to determine tomorrow’s forecast with the best of the meteorologists. That said, you will need to document the weather for two weeks during the summer—or longer, if you want.

The weather chart linked above has columns to fill out daily, like temperature, clouds, and barometric pressure. Use the cloud names that you learn from the text. (See cloud figure in module 7.) Here is the link to a weather website. On this site you will find the information for barometric pressure under additional conditions lower down on this page.  You may want to flag this page for your reference daily during this project.

For those who like the work broken down into a daily reading assignment….

DUE DATE  WEEK 1 CLASS

• Read Module 7 and answer Study Guides. Have your parent check the study guides. Students, read over On Your Own questions and answers while you read the module, but you do not need to do this written work as you will for the other modules.
  • pp. 157-161
  • pp. 161-165
  • pp. 165-171
  • pp. 171-176
• Read Module 8 and answer Study Guides. Have your parent check the study guides. Students, read over on your own questions and answers, but you do not need to do this written work as you will for the other modules.
  • pp. 181-183
  • pp. 183-190
  • pp. 190-194
  • pp. 194-199
• Do a weather chart for 14 days.  See how well you were at predicting the weather in week two of your project. The prediction instructions are in the lab from Module 8.
• Here’s the Module 8 Experiment Summary if you want to do this at home for fun.