This resource provides maps, a data table, images, and a video to explain the relationship between latitude and climate.
There is also a summary, assessment questions, and interactive practice questions available for students to check their understanding.
The video provides an overview of geography, climate, climate regions, and the effects of latitude, elevation, wind currents, and ocean currents on climate.
Teaching Tips
Positives
The video is comprehensive and the interactive practice questions adapt to the student's answers to ensure understanding.
Students can click on the green text to view the definition of key terms.
Additional Prerequisites
You must create an account to use the interactive tools.
Each student will need their own computer to do the interactive practice questions.
Teachers may want to show the video in segments:
The first 3 minutes and 19 seconds of the video introduce students to the rotation of the Earth on its axis, the revolution of the Earth around the Sun, the tilt of the axis, and the seasons.
The section specifically on latitude spans from 3 minutes and 19 seconds to 5 minutes and 29 seconds.
The last segment of the video discusses how elevation and wind and ocean currents affect climate.
Differentiation
This resource could be incorporated into virtual learning lessons or in-class activities.
Social studies classes could use this resource when discussing the ways a region's climate affects how people live.
In math classes, students could analyze the data presented.
Other resources related to this topic include this lesson on weather versus climate and this video for teachers on how to teach about weather and climate.
Scientist Notes
This resource underscores factors that influence the climate system including latitude, elevation, wind, precipitation, etc. This is recommended as it introduces students to the climate system and classifications.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS2: Earth's Systems
MS-ESS2-6 Develop and use a model to describe how unequal heating and rotation of the Earth cause patterns of atmospheric and oceanic circulation that determine regional climates.
LS2: Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics
MS-LS2-4 Construct an argument supported by empirical evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations.
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards
Dimension 2: Geography
D2.Geo.2.6-8 Use maps, satellite images, photographs, and other representations to explain relationships between the locations of places and regions, and changes in their environmental characteristics.
D2.Geo.5.6-8 Analyze the combinations of cultural and environmental characteristics that make places both similar to and different from other places.
D2.Geo.10.6-8 Analyze the ways in which cultural and environmental characteristics vary among various regions of the world.
