This time of year you might feel that you actually could fry an egg on the hot sidewalk, but a quick look at the Wunderground website (www.wunderground.com) might confirm the actual temperature very close to your own neighborhood. Through a gift to the Midway ISD Education Foundation, KWTX and Gray Broadcasting funded a weather station at South Bosque Elementary School. Current weather data including wind velocity, temperature, humidity and barometer pressure is transmitted to the KWTX weather station to allow the local weathercasters to get a “real time” reading of atmospheric conditions at South Bosque Elementary.
The weather is one of the greatest forces in our daily lives. All people are affected by the weather around them. The ability to use weather to make daily decisions about clothing, transportation, and safety is a necessary skill for survival. In order to analyze the weather, students need to be able to read thermometers, number lines, recognize patterns, and evaluate information on maps, charts, and graphs. These skills are not only helpful in analyzing the weather, but they are also helpful in other areas of daily life such as cooking and public transportation.
As early as Kindergarten, the State of Texas requires students to be able to track the weather on a daily basis. Using the weather station at South Bosque Elementary School, students can easily fulfill this requirement. An outdoor weather station located on campus gives students meaningful and hands-on access to the instruments that meteorologists use to analyze and predict the weather. Conveniently located in the school’s outdoor garden, the station includes analog weather instruments attached to a child-sized sign that includes a thermometer, barometer, rain gauge, a clock, and a windsock. On the top of a sign is an electronic weather station that broadcasts digital readings to the internet, as well as to an app installed to the students’ iPads for use during the school year.
Fourth grade teacher Holly Land spearheaded the implementation of the weather center project at South Bosque Elementary this past school year. “The students love the weather station and frequently ask if we can go down and look at it. The app on our iPads has been very useful. It allows us to look at the weather charts and notice patterns such as what time of day the wind is blowing the hardest.”
KWTX broadcast a live weather report from South Bosque the day that the grant was dedicated in their honor. Periodically, viewers can view data from the South Bosque Elementary weather station during the daily weather forecast on KWTX Channel 10. Meanwhile, the student serving as “Principal of the Day” at South Bosque Elementary School has also had the opportunity to give the morning forecast during the campus broadcast of the morning announcements, using data from the weather station.
“Knowing the exact weather at our school has been helpful in the students being able to make choices about daily life; such as whether to wear a jacket to recess. Being able to make these kinds of choices is a necessary life skill,” remarked Mrs. Land.
The Education Foundation is grateful for the support of KWTX and for this designated donation to fund the South Bosque weather station. Who knows? Perhaps we are training their next meteorologist at South Bosque Elementary right now!
Visit www.wunderground.com and search for South Bosque Elementary to view current weather conditions or download the Wunderground App on your mobile device.
