Description
What our Temperature lesson plan includes
Lesson Objectives and Overview: Temperature explores the concepts around the weather and measuring the temperature with degrees. Students will learn about thermometers and how they work. They will also discover the difference between degrees Fahrenheit and Celsius. This lesson is for students in 1st grade, 2nd grade, and 3rd grade.
Classroom Procedure
Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the yellow box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand. For this lesson, gather thermometers, old magazines or other picture sources, colored pencils, scissors, and glue.
Options for Lesson
In the “Options for Lesson” section of the classroom procedure page, you will find several suggestions for activities or ideas to add to the lesson. A couple involve the activity portions. Students could work in pairs or alone for the activities. If thermometers are unavailable, just use the second activity. Another option is to have students use the thermometers (if you have them) to record the temperature outdoors each day for one month. If you teach older students, add a discussion about how to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius and back again. One more idea is to prepare various bowls of water and other liquids or foods. Have students use a food thermometer to measure the temperatures of each item.
Teacher Notes
The paragraph on this page provides a little extra information on what you can expect from the lesson. You could also teach this lesson at the same time as or before a lesson photosynthesis. Use the lines to write out your thoughts as you prepare.
TEMPERATURE LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
Celsius and Fahrenheit
The Temperature lesson plan has two pages of content. It starts off by asking a couple questions about how to know what to do when it’s cold or hot outside. The answer is, of course, looking at the temperature for that day. Temperature is a measurement of the coldness or hotness of an object or of the air. That means that we can measure the temperature of the air outside or the milk in the refrigerator.
We measure temperature using a thermometer. A regular thermometer has a special substance in it that sinks or rises depending on how much heat it measures. As the temperature rises, the liquid in the thermometer expands and rises. And when the temperature drops, the liquid compresses and drops lower. The numbers on the side indicate how hot or cold is it.
There are two different units of measurement when it comes to temperature. The United States uses degrees (°) Fahrenheit (F). The degree is the number that tells us how hot or cols something is. For example, when it is pretty hot outside, the temperature might be something like 95 degrees Fahrenheit, or 95°F. When it’s cold, on the other hand, we might see 25°F or even lower.
In most other parts of the world, people don’t use degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, they use degrees Celsius (C). For those countries, a hot day might show a temperature of 35°C. And when it’s cold, something like -3°C would be pretty likely.
Sample Temperatures
The lesson lists several examples of items or scenarios that would or should yield certain temperatures. The human body tends to have a pretty normal and steady temperature of 98.6°F. If a thermometer indicates a number higher than that, it’s possible that person has a fever. As another example, we have to cook certain foods to a specific temperature to ensure they are safe to eat, like hamburger cooked to 160°F.
Water freezes at 32°F. In order to see snow falling outside the window, it has to be at least that cold or lower. On the flip side, water boils at 212°F, which is very hot and dangerous. If we want to know what those numbers are in degrees Celsius, water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C.
In some places, temperatures can reach well above 100°F, which is very hot and dangerous. And other places can drop well below 0°F, which is equally dangerous and extremely cold. People and pets have to be careful during those periods of extreme weather conditions. Even bath water can be dangerous if its temperature is much higher than 100°F.
Why Measure Temperature?
Measuring temperatures is important because of how much valuable information we can get from it about people, places, or things. Knowing how hot or cold it is outside helps us know how to dress. We wouldn’t want to wear shorts when it’s 15°F outside! Similarly, we wouldn’t wear a heavy coat in 90°F weather.
As in the example about hamburgers, knowing that food is cooked to the proper temperature can be vital. If something that should be fully cooked is not, it can be dangerous to consume. In fact, it could make people sick. Even though some foods seem to be okay, they can cause problems if they aren’t cooked fully.
Sometimes having a warm forehead is a sign of a fever. Parents and doctors use thermometers to make sure people are healthy. If someone does have a high temperature, a doctor can easily get them medicine to make them feel better. Even the temperature of the water in a fish tank should be within a certain range so that the fish don’t die.
TEMPERATURE LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The Temperature lesson plan includes four worksheets: two activity worksheets, a practice worksheet, and a homework assignment. Each one of these handouts will help students demonstrate their knowledge and will reinforce what they learned throughout the lesson. Use the guidelines on the classroom procedure page to determine when to give students each worksheet.
RECORD CHART ACTIVITY WORKSHEET
There are two parts to the activity. First, you will take students to various parts of the school and outside. Students will record the temperature in each place. They will also write about each area using words that describe the hotness or coolness of the room. If it’s available, they will also record the temperature in degrees Celsius.
The second and third activity pages have boxes on which students will draw or paste pictures of people, places, or things related to the range of temperatures given. There are six boxes total, with 0°F to 32°F as the first range and 100°F or more as the last.
THERMOMETERS PRACTICE WORKSHEET
For the practice worksheet, students will look at eight thermometer readings and determine what temperature the red bar represents. They will write that number below the proper thermometer. Then they will color in eight more thermometers according to the given temperatures below each one.
TEMPERATURE HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
The homework assignment requires students to first match words from a word bank to the correct definition. There are five definitions and terms to match in this section. Next, students will answer a series of 10 questions regarding what they learned throughout the lesson.
Worksheet Answer Keys
The lesson plan provides answer keys for the practice and homework worksheets. All the correct answers are in red to make it easy to compare them with your students’ work. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.
