Weather Lesson
Weather types and “What’s the weather like?”

by Neil Maher

Grade: 5 and 6 year.
Time: 2 classes or more!

Part 1:

Begin by eliciting different types of weather from the students. Japanese is OK. As they give different weathers, draw a picture representing them on the board together with the English title. For example I draw a snowman with snow falling around him from a cloud to represent snow. If the kids get stuck give them some prompts. About 12 different types of weather are necessary. Once all the different types of weather are on the board, go through them and get the students to repeat them. Difficult ones such as hail, fog and windy are easily forgotten by the kids and might need extra practice on pronunciation. I taught 12 weather types : rain, sunny, hot, cold, windy, snowy, fog, hail, ice, typhoon, fine, lightning/ thunder.

Weather Forecasting. Time: 15-20 minutes

Next hand each student a copy of the weather forecasting handout and tell them they are going to be “tenki yohou hitos” (gets a laugh). The handout has three columns with five rows. Column one is for the days of the week they are forecasting the weather for. Column two is morning (asa) and column three is evening (gogo). The 5 rows correspond to the days of the week. The students have to draw the weather for each day of the week, morning and evening. They can have more than one type of weather for a morning or evening. For example, Monday morning can be windy and rainy. The completion of the handout takes about 10 minutes. Once everyone has filled in their handout, begin asking students what the weather will be like. For example;
AET: What’s the weather like on Tuesday evening?
ST: Typhoon !
Hopping form kid to kid for the different parts of the days is good fun because you get crazy weather forecasts, i.e. Monday morning ? snow and typhoon, Monday evening ? sunny.

Weather Circle Bingo Time: 10 ? 20 minutes

After doing the weather forecasting activity, the students are good at hearing the weather type and being able to put it with its picture. Time for weather bingo! However, because I only used 12 weather types I didn’t have enough squares for a normal game of bingo. So I changed it so that instead of writing numbers in a normal grid, the students write them in a circle which is divided into 6 sections. This way the students have to pick 6 weather types at random. If one of their “weathers” is called out the student quickly shades in that section of the circle. The first to shade in all sections of the wheel is the winner. It is good listening practice and was very popular with my students.

Click here for the handout

Part 2

Aim: Teaching Q: “What’s the weather like?” A: “it's (hot)”
Time: 20 ? 40 minutes (entire part 2 time)

Begin by revising the different weather types. Introduce the question “What’s the weather like?” and the answer “it’s….rain/snow/hot” etc. Play the Genki English song. Practice some more using the ball and circle game. To play the ball and circle game, weather flash cards are necessary. Put the flash cards in the centre of the circle face down. The question ball kid asks “What’s the weather like?” and the answer ball kid turns over a card and answers with whatever weather is on the card.

Weather Collection Time: 10 - 20 minutes

Once the students are comfortable with the question and how to answer it give each student a weather flash card and a handout with all the weather pictures on it. Students must wander about the room, pair off with another kid and then ask each other what the weather is like and answering with whatever is on their card. Once they have completed the dialogue they swap weather cards. After that they then janken (in English ?). The winner is allowed mark on his weather handout the weather card he has just collected. The loser has to find another partner. The aim of the game is to mark off all 12 weather types on the weather handout. Of course to get the kids started they are allowed to mark off on the handout the weather card they start with. This game is great practice and fun and my students refused to finish it until all of them had each collected all of the weather types.

This game works best with small classes (which all of mine are) but would work in large classes if the class is divided into groups and the game is played within those groups.

(C) Copyright 2002 Neil Maher

Neil has also contributed his Snakes and Ladders and Playing Card Time Lessons

Do you have a great original game? Take some pictures, write it up and if it's good enough you might get the fame and glory of having it appear on Genki English!! : )

For other weather ideas have a look at the new Webcam Weather lesson! and the Genki English Talking Weather Mini Lesson!

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Weather Lesson Weather types and “What’s the weather like?”

Part 2

Weather Lesson
Weather types and “What’s the weather like?”