In my field classroom last week, my students were learning about weather in their social studies unit-which is directly related to science. As a teacher, I would take this opportunity to teach cross-curriculum, pointing out how many aspects of science can be seen in other subjects, especially in social studies, and I would go more in depth about the science aspect of this. The students listened as the teacher read from the class "big book", and they heard several different terms defined, including weather and various subtopics of this, and they read a story about storms-learning about hailstorms, thunderstorms, blizzards, floods, volcanoes (wind storms), etc. The students are rather familiar with the basic weather we see here in Michigan (snow, sun, wind, fog, rain) as they live it everyday, and additionally there is a "weather chart" in the class, of which the kids record their weather observations each day. The kids were given a homework assignment last Monday from my CT to watch the weather sometime that night or the next night and try to find out what the weather would be like the rest of the week. On Wednesday, when my teacher asked if anyone did the assignment, several kids responded that it was sunny, and much to my surprise (and I was VERY impressed!), one of our students raised his hand and said "On channel 55, the weather man, he's called the meteorologist, predicted, that's when you guess, that it would be sunny today and sunny tomorrow and sunny with clouds on Friday, and today its going to be 69 degrees"--VERY detailed and impressive for a six year old kid! This brought our class into discussions about the terms meteorologist (and his job) and measuring temperatures (degrees, etc).
In social studies, the kids learned through a big book reading about such things as: mountain, plain, lake, river, ocean, natural resource, and national parks. While they didn't go very in depth with this lesson today, in was a great introduction to a lesson about landforms and the earth--sounds very fun!
Later in the month, the kids will be planting flowers that butterflies are attracted to and creating a butterfly garden, which will be a great science lesson for them that will be so engaging and fun for them-I wish I would still be around so I could see them do this, I know they will just love it!