Amazing World Records of Weather—20 Innovative, Easy-to-Integrate Lesson Plans

To the Teacher

 

WORLD RECORDS OF HOT AND COLD

 

1. The World’s Sunniest Place

A. The World’s Sunniest Place

B. What Makes Weather?

C. The Uneven Heating of the Earth

 

2. The World’s Hottest Place

A. The World’s Hottest Place

B. The Dangers of Heat

C. Folklore for Hot Days

 

3. The World’s Highest Temperature.

A. The World’s Highest Temperature

B. Understanding Temperature Scales

C. Converting Temperatures

 

4. The World’s Coldest Place

A. The World’s Coldest Place

B. The Dangers of Cold

C. Folklore for Cold and Snow

 

5. The World’s Lowest Temperature

A. The World’s Lowest Temperature

B. Understanding Thermometers.

C. Tracking the Temperature

 

WORLD RECORDS OF AIR PRESSURE

 

6. The World’s Highest Air Pressure

A. The World’s Highest Air Pressure

B. What Is Air Pressure?

C. Air Pressure and Weather

 

7. The World’s Lowest Air Pressure

A. The World’s Lowest Air Pressure

B. Understanding Barometers

C. Making a Barometer

 

8. The World’s Windiest Place

A. The World’s Windiest Place

B. Why Does the Wind Blow?

C. Understanding the Coriolis Effect

 

9. The World’s Highest Wind Speed

A. The World’s Highest Wind Speed

B. Wind and Its Effects

C. Constructing a Weather Vane

 

WORLD RECORDS OF PRECIPITATION

 

10. The World’s Wettest Place

A. The World’s Wettest Place

B. Understanding Monsoons

C. What Makes Rain?

 

11. The World’s Greatest Rainfall

A. The World’s Greatest Rainfall

B. Constructing a Rain Gauge

C. Classifying Rain

 

12. The World’s Greatest Snowfall

A. The World’s Greatest Snowfall

B. Why Does It Snow?

C. Snow

13. The World’s Driest Place

A. The World’s Driest Place

B. Rainmaking

C. Understanding Drought

 

14. The World’s Foggiest Place

A. The World’s Foggiest Place

B. What Makes Fog?

C. Ships in Fog

 

15. The World’s Heaviest Hail

A. The World’s Heaviest Hail

B. What Makes Hail?

C. Huge Hailstones

 

WORLD RECORDS OF WEATHER DISASTERS

 

16. The World’s Deadliest Hurricane

A. The World’s Deadliest Hurricane

B. Understanding Hurricanes

C. Tracking a Hurricane

 

17. The World’s Worst Tornado

A. The World’s Worst Tornado

B. Why Are There Tornadoes?

C. Tornado Safety

 

18. The World’s Worst Flood

A. The World’s Worst Flood

B. The River of Sorrow

 

19. The World’s Worst Weather Disaster

A. The World’s Worst Weather Disaster

B. Natural Disasters at the Head of the Bay of Bengal

C. Preparing for a Natural Disaster

 

20. The World’s Worst Weather

A. The Country with the World’s Worst Weather

B. Understanding Weather in the United States

C. The National Weather Service

 

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The Weird, the Wonderful, and Emphatically Not the Everyday

Using WORLD RECORDS to Capture Student Interest and Provide Intellectual and Emotional Context

 

 

 

If you teach kids ages 8 to 15, you should know about Kieran Egan’s simple yet stunning ideas about using world records to reach them.

Kieran Egan is an educational philosopher and the author of The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding.

 

I. World Records Capture Student Interest

One of Egan’s key ideas is that children between the ages of 8 and 15 are hungry for what he calls “Romantic knowledge.” By providing appropriate instruction, teachers and parents can use this hunger to bring their instruction to a whole new level. Egan writes:

 

"Students in early adolescence seem most readily engaged...by material such as that compiled in the Guinness Book of Records. That is, they are attracted not to reality in its everyday aspects, but rather to its extremes, to exotica and the bizarre."

 

The student's imaginative grappling with reality emphasizes
who or what is the biggest, the smallest, the fastest, the slowest, the fattest, the thinnest, the hairiest, etc. It is the mysterious,
the strange, the weird, the wonderful, and emphatically not the everyday that engages the student's imagination.

Put simply, the extremes of the world are exactly what students at

this stage of cognitive development are naturally most interested in.

 

II. World Records Give Students Context for Knowledge and Self

Students love world records because the records form an outline of the world. As students learn, it is as though they are completing a jigsaw puzzle. Each bit of knowledge they acquire is a piece of the puzzle that needs to fit in somewhere. The world records are like the edge and corner pieces of a puzzle—they form the outline that all other knowledge fits within.

 

This is extremely intellectually satisfying to the young adolescent mind.

Moreover, its emotionally satisfying as well. Egan explains:

 

"By discovering the real limits of the world and of human experience, we form a context that enables us to establish some security and to establish proportionate meaning within it. Knowing about the biggest and smallest...allows us, on the one hand, to wonder at their extreme sizes, but, on the other hand, to be reassured about our own scale. Once we have some sense of context, we can begin to develop some sense of proportionate meaning of things."

 

Helping kids develop “some sense of proportionate meaning,” arguably, is the ultimate goal of every teacher and parent.

 

III. World Records Are Easy to Integrate into Your Teaching

To Egan, the young adolescents’ interest in world records is undeniable. Their “interest in these features of reality is,” he writes, “so obvious.” So he was troubled that this type of learning wasn’t being used by educators to reach and teach students. “It is a little odd,” he writes,” that the 8-to-15 year olds’ enjoyment of books, TV shows, and films that deal with the exotic and extreme has had so

little impact on curriculum....”

 

This “little impact on curriculum” has been unfortunate. Happily, however, integrating world records into your teaching is remarkably easy.

World Records are the perfect bellringer or launchpad for discussion. For geography, ask, “What is the world’s longest river?” In government, ask, “What is world’s oldest government?” In history, ask, “What was the world’s oldest city?” In economics, ask, “What was the world’s first industry?” In cultural studies ask, “What is the world’s most diverse country?”

 

And so on. By asking questions like these, you immediately reach the parts your students that are already intellectually and emotionally hungry. By basing further instruction on world records, you will provide your students with a “sense of context” so that they may “begin to develop some sense of proportionate meaning of things.”

And isn’t that why we teach?

 

Click to visit the Amazing World Records Interactive Map