Positives

• This is a hands-on and engaging lesson that students will remember and enjoy.
• It gets students out of their seats to participate in a physical activity.
• Teachers can use this student-facing presentation to give students visual support during the lesson.

Additional Prerequisites

• Students should have prior knowledge about basic weather terms, such as precipitation, and be competent with fractions and percentages.
• There are additional teacher prep materials provided in the lesson, including a 12-minute video tutorial showing how to set up the paper airplane tests.
• Students will need paper to make their airplanes and teachers will need placeholders and dividers for the activity.
  

Differentiation

• Math students can practice graphing out the results of their airplane experiments.
• Science classes can use this activity to reinforce the importance of data collection, data analysis, and using more than one model to predict possible outcomes.
  
• In a language arts class, consider having students journal about a weather event they experienced or a time that they used a weather forecast to plan a trip or event. After the lesson, have students return to their writing to add information about what they learned.