When it snows, children are permitted to play outside during recess, which causes them to experience a variety of problems with their mittens or gloves. To align instruction with a problem student's experience in every day life, the authors developed and administered a short survey to second graders in an after school program. The authors found…

To show students how engineering design practices reduce the impacts of a natural hazard, the authors--two science educators and an elementary teacher--taught a three-day 5E lesson that focused on hurricanes. They specifically focused on hurricanes because their students are located near a coastal area and are familiar with the effects of this…

While learning about the types of weather events that occur in the local area, students in grades 4-6 were asked to consider how structures can be built to withstand extreme weather conditions. Teams of students designed, constructed, and tested buildings to withstand hurricanes and designed the tests they would use to evaluate their structures.…

This USMES unit challenges students to find out what information helps most in accurately predicting the weather. The teacher resource book for the Weather Predictions unit contains five sections. The first section describes the USMES approach to student-initiated investigations of real problems, including a discussion of the nature of the USMES…

Because student activities are often restricted by inclement weather, this Unified Sciences and Mathematics for Elementary Schools (USMES) unit challenges students to predict weather to help them plan activities and schedules. The challenge is general enough to apply to many problem-solving situations in mathematics, science, social science, and…