Severe Weather Education
Connect with the NWS/Virtual Field Trips - This webpage from Discovery Education provides virtual videos and hands-on activities for the classroom for Hurricanes, Winter Storms & Ice, Tornadoes, and Wildfires. This page is unique because the virtual videos for hurricanes and tornadoes show using visual effects the type of damage expected at the various scales of wind speeds - they are definitely worth a watch and would be great for the classroom!
How Do You Make a Tornado? - CoCoRaHS provides an experiment demonstrating the power of tornadoes by allowing students to create mini tornados in a water bottle. Students are told to place small objects in the water tornado to demonstrate the destructive power of a tornado at a small, safe scale.
Making Lightning: In Your Mouth! - This experiment from CoCoRaHS demonstrates how lightning is created. Students are able to create "lightning in their mouth" by biting into a wintergreen lifesaver.
Meteotsunamis - The Coastal Management Program (CMP) has made an educational fact sheet of the severe weather phenomenon on the Great Lakes known as meteotsunami, a tsunami-like wave caused by weather systems.
NWS HotSeat: Warning Decision Simulator - To give students a realistic feel on what it is like to forecast, this webpage from the Peachtree City, Georgia National Weather Service office gives the opportunity to work through various forecasting scenarios as a "game". Example scenarios include a severe weather outbreak, an outbreak of large hail and tornadoes across the Atlanta metropolitan area, or severe storms striking in Chicago in August 2008.
Ready Kids - Disasters happen everywhere, and every member of the family can prepare. Preparedness for the future starts today. Whether you’re a kid or teen yourself, a parent or loved one, or work with youth, Ready Kids has tools and information to help before, during and after disasters.
Severe Weather 101 - NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) has created a list of educational pages that discuss the development and impact of various aspects of severe weather (i.e. thunderstorms, tornadoes, lightning, floods, hail, damaging winds, winter weather).
Tornadoes 101 Video - A video from National Geographic that discusses how tornadoes form.
Weather WizKids: Tornadoes - This webpage on tornadoes from Weather WizKids is geared toward a younger audience and includes basic tornado information. At the bottom of the page, some tornado activities are also highlighted.
Winter Weather Resources - The National Weather Service provides winter weather education and links to various winter weather resources to keep the public informed.
Winter Weather Teaching Box- This Winter Weather Teaching Box from Spark science education is a themed collection of classroom-ready and standards-aligned activities, content, and multimedia that build student understanding of science, technology, engineering, and math in the context of winter weather.