Hey guys,

does anyone have any good ideas for weather games?
The target age is Grade 2 JHS.

Thanks

D

I cant say that I have a game, but how about an exercise? We have weather listening exercises and matching worksheets that would be a great activity for Junior High Students at 123 Listening. The worksheets match with the MES English flashcards, so if you are using those, your students will already be familiar with the look.

http://www.123listening.com

its all free to download and use, best of luck!

In France, we are expected to teach students to speak on their own to the whole class or to their teacher for 5 minutes and all our classes are meant to focus on civilisation/ Anglo saxon culture. Therefore, to work on the weather vocabulary I made them search for a weather map of England and asked them to describe the enlarged map as if they were a weather man... It was very funny to prepare and watch (and they thus discovered some English newspapers and learnt to situate many English cities) and some of them had their first experience of theatre thanks to this activity.

Place the large weather cards on a table, the floor, or tape to the board, the students draw cards from different sets of the game cards for sports, hobbies, verbs(like play,swim, pinao, read, etc.) and then they have to decided what kind of weather can they do the activity in and place their cards under the right weather.

Alternately the teacher can place the cards under the weather cards and then the teacher can call out different weather or activites and the student must deicide if they can do that activity or not with the weather it's under.

This mainly works, with sunny, rainy, snowy, but it can work with most of them. Naturally, students will probably put hike or play soccer under sunny/perfect weather, but we can play soccer when it rains or is foggy.

You have to decide if you are going to ask "can people do the activity" or "What kind of weather does the student do the activity."

A little late for Mr. Daniel, but maybe you can save this for next year.

Weather and few other categories I don't really like so much, because it seems like forced conversation. Kids don't care what the weather is like in London ...


Anyway, here's how I've made a weather activity somewhat natural:

I play baseball. I have the students divide up some activities (verb) cards into indoor activities and outdoor activities. (You can further divide outdoor activities into summer and winter as well to make them more difficult.)

The pitcher would choose a weather card. Then, the batter would draw and activity card and say something like:
B: I want to play soccer.

If the pitcher has a fair weather card, the batter gets a hit. The pitcher would say something like:
P: Well, it's perfect today. That sounds like fun.

If the pitcher has a bad weather card, the batter is out. The pitcher would say something like:
P: It's raining. You can't play soccer (in the rain.)

adjust up or down for the students level.



That can be used for anything, not just within baseball.

You can have two teams racing on a board game. Make an activity board game and have Team2 select a weather card. Team1 rolls the dice and attempts to move to that square. Say Team1 lands on 'play soccer'. The students would complete the conversation as above. If the activity and weather match, the team stays on that square. If they don't match, Team1 would have to return to where they were.

You can obiviously adjust the conversation to the future as well.
'I want to play soccer tomorrow.'
'I'm supposed to go shopping with my mom tomorrow.'
'I'm planning on watching TV this weekend.'
...

we play a game with weather like the pirate ship -

where you call out a type of weather and they have to do the corresponding action.

as a class we decide the actions for each weather e.g. sunny could be shading eyes etc.

you can combine - hot and sunny etc

and you can also increase the difficulty by having group actions ...

snowy 3 - huddle in a group of 3

any left over or who dont do the action are out ..

familiarises them with vocabulary

Here is an activity I used in my 6th grade elementary class today which worked really well.

1. Introduce the capital / major cities of countries using flash cards of your choice. I used, Seoul, Tokyo, Sydney, London, New Delhi, New York, Beijing, Moscow. You can first get the students to guess the country and then the city or vice versa by showing only the picture.

2. Divide the class into 8 groups and give them a 2 x 4 chart with the name of the cities typed in.

3. Then, stick one of any eight weather cards on the back of each of the city cards and give one to each group. The groups must keep their city a secret.

4. Each member of the group takes turns going to the other groups and asking how is the weather in a chosen city eg. Moscow. If the group he goes to does not have Moscow, they must say, “Sorry, I don’t know”. And the asker must go to another group until he finds out the weather in Moscow.

5. After returning to his group and telling the weather in Moscow, another member goes to find out the weather in another city. Only one student leaves the table at a time.

6. The first group to fill in all their cities weather type is the winner.

7. Be sure to stress they use the full question “How is the weather in Tokyo?” eg. Instead of asking “Tokyo?”

Finally, check by asking each group to say the weather in their city and put on the board under the corresponding city.

Have fun.

I like this idea using the different groups, usually I do as a find the information worksheet. This is a similar idea but more of a game format.
Thanks for the idea, I will try next time I do the weather.