Seasonal Science: Building Claims from Evidence

Positives

• Students are constructing their own understanding of the seasons using data directly.
• The lesson provides teacher talking points to assist teachers in guiding discussions.

Additional Prerequisites

• Students should be able to read a map using latitude and longitude, be familiar with energy transfer, and understand that the Earth orbits the Sun.
• This lesson can be done in an in-person classroom or virtually using the provided Google Slides and Forms.
• Teachers can request an answer key using the link in the lesson plan.

Differentiation

• In this lesson, students read and interpret maps, which allows for cross-curricular connections with geography courses.
• There is a rubric provided for the Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning (CER) statements, which allows for these to be used as a formative or summative assessment.
• For students who may need additional support, teachers can provide sentence stems for the CER statements.
• Teachers may need to address the common misconception that seasons are caused by the distance from the Sun to the Earth. Consider using a prop, such as a basketball or globe to help students visualize the direction of the axis (always pointing in the same direction) as the Earth orbits the Sun.
• Connect this lesson to astronomy lessons, as the North Pole always points towards Polaris and there are variations in the orbit and rotation of the Earth (Milankovich cycles) that change the climate over very long time scales