One day it’s warm and sunny, the next it’s freezing and snowing. In summer 2012, there was a drought in Indiana and other states, while hurricanes and snow storms hit the East Coast over the past several months. Second-grade students at Washington STEM Academy are studying weather during this nine-week grading period. According to Principal Tom Ray, students are making and using movies and Quick Response codes to learn more about weather. They are collaborating with other classes so they can share their learning. Teachers Kara Mayer, Derek Pike and Josh Wall are teaching the weather unit. “We’re learning about severe weather,” said second-grader Avery Fitzgerald. “Severe weather can be very dangerous.” “We’ve been learning about weather and it can be very dangerous and your house can fall down,” said Grace Bishop. She said the neatest thing about weather is “how fast weather can be and how strong. It’s really neat to learn how fast it is.” In Mayer’s class Tuesday afternoon, second-grader Eliott Prescott said the students were using iPads to read QR codes and learn more. Sometimes the codes pull up videos, sometimes it’s a website of information. Prescott said he’s never used QR codes before, but liked them. “We’ve learned about blizzards, floods, thunderstorms and lightning. We know about what to do in case of a storm,” said student Ethan Spencer. Now that he knows more about weather, Spencer said he wasn’t as afraid of it. Mayer said the second-grade classes started the weather unit at the beginning of the third nine weeks. The teachers are building a sense of inquiry with the students, and using the QR codes to get them interested. For their final project students will do their own weather report using the vocabulary they learned. They will choose one thing they want to focus on and develop a forecast on that. For the unit, Science Central also came in from Fort Wayne and provided the students with an afternoon of stations to learn all the components of weather. There were a lot of hands-on activities. Washington had a guest speaker scheduled for Tuesday afternoon who unfortunately had to cancel. He was to talk to the students about how weather affects crops and growth. Pike said the guest speaker from Plymouth was to talk about thunderstorms and show pictures of storm damage. The drought last summer caused trouble for farmers, which the speaker was to discuss. The students then were to use problem solving to help come up with some solutions to help farmers in times of drought, Pike said.
