Students will participate in the following interdisciplinary activities as part of the Spice Up the Basal unit.

Objectives:  

The students will demonstrate an understanding of geometry and spatial sense. 
The students will use latitude and longitude coordinates to locate places on a world map.
The students will analyze data and construct a bar graph. 
The students will use measurement to plan and prepare Tornado Salad.

Activities:

A) The students will use a funnel shape (tornado) as a manipulative.
Prior vocabulary:  translation -  slide
rotation  -  turn
reflection - flip
When an oral command such as, "Show me a 90 degree rotation clockwise" is given, the students will manipulate the tornado  on their desk demonstrating success of the command.  Other commands may include:
a) Show me a 90 degree turn/rotation counter-clockwise.
b) Do a vertical reflection
c) Show me a horizontal translation...
*Double and triple commands can be give to challenge students.

B)  The students will use a world map to locate a major city or country from a given set of coordinates by drawing a geometrical shape on the city or country.
Example:    Draw a rectangle on 27 degrees N latitude and 80 degrees W longitude (approx: Miami, Fl)

C) Students visit the NASA Web site to learn about latitude and longitude.

Other shapes/term to use with ESOL students:  square, trapezoid, parallelogram, triangles (isosceles, scalene, equilateral, right), quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, etc.

 D) The students will use the weather section of the newspaper to graph the previous day's temperature of  8 major cities.   (Miami, FL; Sydney, Australia; Los Angeles, CA; Boston, MA; Anchorage, AK; Detroit, MI; Boise, ID and Philadelphia, PA). 

E) Visit USA Today to discover facts about the weather. Click on Weather.
  
F) Plan, prepare and eat Tornado Salad.

Tornado Salad

Ingredients:  
Cool Whip or any whip cream (4 containers)
Pistachio Jell-O pudding (2 boxes)

 Mix ingredients into large container.
 Stir and serve

The students can have fun and delicious time making tornado, clouds and other  shapes on their plates.

    A  SIMPLE  WAY  TO  END  THE  DAY!

Evaluation: Students will be assessed on their final products; these products can be kept in a unit portfolio.

Resources

Night of the Twisters The story online and hard copy of book written by Ivy Ruckman

Twisters Tornado Activities

Discovery.com- Tornado Follow a tornado tracker

Germantown- Tornado Read a report about tornadoes

USA Today- Tornado Excellent facts about tornadoes

Discovery Kids publish puzzles online using Puzzlemaker

Web Weather great weather site

Zuzu publish poems and stories online

EPals Web site  locate epals

WSVN local weather Web site

Tornado Projects  a tornado project online

Internet Classroom Activities. Educational Insights; Carson, CA. 2000.

Bromley, K. Graphic Organizers. Scholastic: New York. 1995.