How to Create a Weather Forecast

Hi, my name's Jessica Harris, and I'm a 5th grade educator at new Salem elementary. What I'd like to share with you today is how I have my students culminate the knowledge they learned in our weather unit by creating their very own weather forecasts. The way I teach this unit is of course I first start with the basics. I introduce concepts to my students that will be essential for them in understanding how forecasting works. We talk about cold fronts and warm fronts, occluded fronts and stationary fronts, as well as talk about high pressure and low pressure systems. We definitely focus in on how each of these systems affect what types of weather that there will be in the area. Next, I find images that my students can use for forecasting. Whether dot com is a great source of images. And when you go first go to their website, you could click on this map tab. And the current weather tab will show you an image of the current weather over the whole United States. I like using this image because it usually has a lot of things going on. And it's also a good integration of geography as students have to figure out which states are where on the map. We're going to be using this image for a lot of things, so we're going to save it to our desktop by control clicking. And going to save image ads. I like to save my image as the date it was made. So this image is taken of weather on February 24th, 2010. So I'm going to save it to my desktop. I print out these images and let my students see them first so they could plan their own forecast using the images. Next, after their forecasts are planned, I utilize green screen technology so they could create a forecast just like meteorologists, they see on TV. If you're using a PC, if you go to YouTube, there's actually a video that shows you how to use Windows movie maker and implement green screen technology with that. Our school uses Mac. So I'm going to be showing you how to use max photo booth software to create your own one. I don't have a quick link on my laptop, so I'm going to go to send photo booth. So I could open up my photo booth software. Should put that with me. There we go. This is a part I dislike because you're all going to stare at me now. There is a little bit of delay since I'm screen casting. Just bear with me. On the photograph software, you could see an effects tab. I'm going to click it, and this is going to show you all the different effects you could use with photo booths. I'm going to move to the best page, because this is where we could customize which type of backgrounds we want to use for our forecast. Okay. Here is the picture we saved earlier off of weather dot com and it's as simple as clicking on this picture. Dragging it into your photo booth software, that plus sign lets you know that it's ready to be added as a background. Just drop it into there. And when you click on the image, it's going to take a picture of the background. When this happens, you can not be in the background for it. So I'm going to go ahead and click on this image, and I'm going to step out of the frame. You can see it's not quite perfect, but I didn't put anything fancy up to help me record. If you want yours to look a little bit more professional and not have these little spots in it, if you put up just green construction paper in your background, it helps a lot. You want to choose a place that is going to have a bare background. So if you want to do this in your media center, your gymnasium, any place in which you could have good background to use for this. It's going to make your project a lot easier. To make the forecast now it's simple as changing this to video mode by clicking on this third button. And pressing record. Welcome to the weather forecast. I truly believe in teacher collaboration, so contact me if you have any questions or if you want to share with me what you did with your own class and how you adapted this project to suit your own needs. I'd be definitely interested in seeing what you've done. It's Jessica doubt Harris at UC PS dot K12 NC dot U.S.. Thank you and good luck with your forecasting.