NAVIGATING THE WEB - Recommended Web Sites |
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Speaking About the Weather ... When you use the Internet you soon discover that a lot of information is posted and then forgotten about. Most sites are not updated on a regular basis. At the other extreme there are Web sites that contain up to the minute information. You can use the Internet to find out the latest news, the latest stock quotes, or the current movies playing at the local theater. Although news sites usually contain writing far beyond most literacy students, weather information on the Internet can be more accessible to many students. For example, http://weather.yahoo.com/regional/Canada.html contains five-day forecasts for many cities in Canada. The information is very simply laid out and could be worked into a unit on reading and writing weather words. The five-day forecasts also provide an opportunity to reinforce the days of the week. Environment Canada has a similar bilingual site at http://www.weatheroffice.com (English) / http://www.bureaumeteo.com (French). Here you can click on a map of Canada and receive five-day forecasts for various cities across Canada. Weather could become a daily reading activity for your students by using the e-Weather feature at this site. If your students have email accounts and they subscribe to e-Weather they would receive the weather conditions for a Canadian city each day by email. Another Environment Canada site that contains five-day forecasts is http://weather.ec.gc.ca/ current_e.shtml (English) / http://weather.ec.gc.ca/current_f.shtml (French). This site provides a more difficult reading challenge. Finally, the CBC News Online also provides current weather information for Canadian cities at http://cbcnews.cbc.ca/weather. This site and the Environment Canada, Weather Office site both use maps and would be great for reinforcing Canadian and world geography. After having your students study weather words you may also want to branch out into studying extreme weather. For example,
These sites could be great jumping off points for writing activities such as: “What is the worst storm you have ever experienced?” , etc. |
