Weather Lesson Plan

TeachingEnglish | Lesson plans
The weather
Topic: The weather
Aims:
- To give students practice in reading for specific information in an online
article about the weather
- To practise pronunciation, word stress and collocations connected with the
weather
Level: Advanced
Introduction
The aim of this lesson is to give students practice in reading for specific
information in an online article about the weather. Students will also have an
opportunity to practise pronunciation, word stress and collocations connected with
the weather.
The plan is based around a text from the British Council LearnEnglish Central
website at: http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/magazine/weather
The webpage also has a variety of online interactive activities.
We have also included the text for students and teachers without Internet access
in class.
Procedure
Introduction task
As a lead-in to the topic, you could show students the BBC weather
website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/world/ and look at the five-day
forecast for your area.
Elicit from students what the various symbols and words mean.
Alternatively use a weather map from a magazine or newspaper.
Pre-reading discussion
Worksheet A
Students should discuss in pairs or groups the difference between the
different weather phenomena.
Tip: photos or drawings of the various weather phenomenon will make comprehension checking
much easier as well as making the vocabulary more memorable for your students.
Pronunciation work
Worksheet B
Ask students in pairs to match the beginnings to the ends of the
phonemically spelt words.
www.teachingenglish.org.uk
BBC | British Council 2010
Write the phonemic next to the actual spelling and drill pronunciation.
Answers:
a
3
b
5
c
6
d
1
e
4
f
2
Vocabulary
Worksheet C
Ask students what adjectives we often use with rain and why, for example,
we say heavy rain and not strong rain. (Answer: because the words form
common collocations or word partnerships).
Ask students in pairs or groups to match the adjectives in column A to the

nouns in column B to form strong collocations. (Note: in some cases there
is more than one possibility).
Tip: If available, provide students with good monolingual dictionaries as these will often give
common collocations, sometimes with example sentences so that your students can see how the
words are used in context. Using a bilingual dictionary is not as helpful and often confusing as
collocations tend to differ between languages.
Suggested collocations:
torrential rain
flash floods
severe gales/weather conditions/storms/floods
dense fog
sunny spells/weather conditions
freak gales/weather conditions/storms/floods
violent gales/weather conditions/storms
high humidity
Pre-reading discussion
Worksheet D
Ask students to discuss the questions in pairs or groups. Monitor the

discussions closely so that you can ask students to bring up any interesting
points they raised in an open-class discussion afterwards.
Reading task
Show students the text about the weather from the website and give them
the reading comprehension questions (below) in Worksheet E. Ask them
to find the answers to the questions. If you have a computer room, you may
prefer them to read the article online at:
http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/magazine/weather

Tip: The online article has a special function that you might like to make students aware of. If they
double-click on any word, a definition will appear in a separate box on the screen.
In class, elicit the answers to the questions.
Worksheet E
1. According to scientific studies, what effects can the weather have on people?
2. What causes changes in the weather in the British Isles?
3. According to some researchers, what effect has human activity in Europe and
North America had on Africa?
4. How can pine cones and seaweed help us predict the weather?
5. How reliable is technology in predicting the weather?
6. What did a recent study by an Australian psychologist suggest?
7. Whats the connection between weather and disease?
8. What are stormchasers

Text
Weather
by Mike Rayner
It's hardly surprising that weather is a favourite topic for so many people around the world
it affects where we choose to live, what we wear, our moods, and perhaps even our
national characteristics. A sunny day can relieve the deepest depression, while extreme
weather can destroy homes and threaten lives.
The effects of weather
Palm trees bent double in hurricane force winds, cars stranded in snow drifts, people
navigating small boats down flooded city streets images we are all familiar with from
news reports of severe weather spells. But many of the effects of the weather are less
newsworthy.
Im feeling a bit under the weather is a common complaint in Britain, especially on
Monday mornings, and it seems that weather really can be responsible for moods.
Studies have shown that changeable weather can make it hard to concentrate, cloudy
skies slow down reflexes, and high humidity with hot, dry winds makes many people
irritable and snappy.
Some suggest that the weather also leaves its mark on character, giving people from the
same region similar temperaments, although it seems that economic, political and social
factors are likely to have a much stronger effect than the weather.
What causes changes in the weather?
If you live in a place like Britain, where the weather seems to change daily if not hourly,
you could be forgiven for thinking that the weather is random. In fact the weather is
controlled by systems which move around areas of the globe. In the UK the weather
depends on depressions, often called lows, and anticyclones, also known as highs.
These systems start in the Atlantic Ocean, and make their way across the British Isles
from the west to the east. Highs bring sunny weather, while lows bring rain and wind.
The weather systems in tropical climates are very different from those in mid and high
latitudes. Tropical storms develop from depressions, and often build into cyclones, violent
storms featuring hurricanes and torrential rain.
In modern times, human activity seems to be altering weather patterns. Gases produced
by heavy industry change the temperature of the Earths surface, and affect cloud
formation. Some researchers say that factories in Europe and North America may have
been one of the causes of the droughts in Africa in the 1980s.
Can we predict the weather?
The human race has always tried to guess the weather, especially in areas of the world
where there are frequent changes. Traditional rhymes point to early attempts to identify
weather patterns, popular poems include:
Red sky at night, shepherds delight; Red sky in the morning, shepherds warning
Ash leaf before the oak, then we will have a summer soak;
Oak leaf before the ash, the summer comes without a splash
Flies will swarm before a storm.
Rain before 7, clear by 11.

Two other popular traditional ways of forecasting the weather used pine cones and
seaweed. When the air has a high level of humidity there is a higher chance of rain, when
the humidity is low, there is more chance of fine weather. Pine cones and seaweed react
to changes in humidity - pines cones open, and seaweed feels dry when the humidity is
low, while high humidity has the opposite effect.
While folk wisdom can still provide a guide to help forecast weather, todays methods of
prediction increasingly rely on technology. Satellites, balloons, ships, aircraft and weather
centres with sensitive monitoring equipment, send data to computers. The data is then
processed, and the weather predicted. However, even this system cannot predict weather
for longer than about week.
A recent study by an Australian psychologist suggests that certain people may have a
special gift for predicting the weather. However it is possible that these people would use
their talent in another way, since the same group had considerable success in forecasting
changes in another chaotic system the stock market.
It appears that a study of weather patterns may also enable scientists to predict the
outbreak of disease. An Ebola epidemic in Uganda in the year 2000 came after the same
rare weather conditions that had been present before an outbreak 6 years earlier. Efforts
to limit the spread of airborne diseases such as foot and mouth, are also strongly
dependent on favourable wind conditions.
Extreme weather
Although people in Britain often moan about the weather, we should spare a thought for
the inhabitants of parts of the world where extreme weather regularly wreaks havoc on
the environment and population. Sandstorms, tornadoes, blizzards and flash floods
regularly kill thousands of people and leave many others homeless.
While most of us try to avoid extreme weather, some adventurous souls actively seek out
places where extreme weather conditions exist. Sports such as surfing, kiteboarding, iceclimbing and white-water rafting are becoming increasingly popular with people seeking
relief from the monotony of daily routine. Extreme sports are about exhilaration, skill and
danger, and often harness the weather to provide adrenaline addicts with their kicks.
Even more extraordinary are storm-chasers weather enthusiasts who risk their lives
following tornadoes and thunderstorms at high speed to witness the damage they cause
at close hand.
Discussion task
In pairs, ask students to discuss the following questions:
Had you heard of any of the ideas in the article before?
Are there any parts of the article that you agree or disagree with? Why?
Have you ever experienced any extreme weather conditions? Where were
you and what was it like?
Follow-up
If your students have Internet access, ask them to search the net for any
stories about extreme weather conditions and report back to the class.

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TeachingEnglish | Lesson plans

TeachingEnglish | Lesson plans

Ask students in pairs or groups to match the adjectives in column A to the

Ask students to discuss the questions in pairs or groups. Monitor the

TeachingEnglish | Lesson plans

In class, elicit the answers to the questions.

TeachingEnglish | Lesson plans

TeachingEnglish | Lesson plans

Had you heard of any of the ideas in the article before?

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