Data & Graphing

Overview: The overarching goal of Earth as a System is Essential: Seasons and the Seas (EaSiE) is to transform the traditional middle school study of terrestrial seasons and weather into an exploration of the dynamic interactions between Earth’s land, water, atmosphere, and the living world. This Data and Graphing lesson series employs NOAA atmospheric data to develop students’ graphing skills. This leads to lessons on interpreting atmospheric data in the Gulf of Maine and culminates with graphing and interpreting data students collected during a prior Weather and Climate lesson.

The prerequisite lesson series, Weather and Climate, can be found here.

This lesson sets the stage for the big idea: Organized data can be used to answer questions about and make sense of natural phenomena such as local weather patterns. The data can also be used to guide the formation of new questions for exploration.

Dataloggers

The Right Tool

Note: This lesson series is intended to serve as a relevant context for the teaching and learning of weather-related ideas in middle school. It is not designed to replace a comprehensive curriculum, but rather enrich and integrate authentic Earth systems science content into instructional units using NOAA resources.