Blog Posting for 1/30/2015
This week news4kids.org aired the following stories:
Lindsey Vonn Breaks Skiing Record K-3
Dakar Rally Winners 4-8
Rio Animals Cool Off K-3
Hottest Year on Record 4-8
Newscast: Lindsey Vonn Breaks Skiing Record K-3
Essential Question: What record did Lindsey Vonn recently break?
Vocabulary: Alpine, slalom, Scandinavia
Learning Objectives:
– Identify Lindsey Vonn as a record-breaking American Alpine skier.
Summary: American ski racer Lindsey Vonn won her 63rd race in the Super-G event in Cortina d’Ampezzo, breaking the record for number of wins in women’s Alpine skiing. Prior to this race, Vonn was tied with Australian Annemarie Moser-Proell’s 62 wins. Vonn, a 2010 Olympic champion, has won three downhill races since her return from a 12-month absence due to knee injuries. She completed the course just 0.85 seconds ahead of second place finisher Anna Fenninger from Austria.
Newscast: Dakar Rally Winners 4-8
Essential Question: What is the Dakar Rally?
Vocabulary: rugged, division, support team
Learning Objectives:
– Identify the Dakar Rally as an annual vehicle race in which racers drive through Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.
Summary: Racers in cars, trucks, quads, and motorbikes competed in the 2015 Dakar Rally across the countries of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. The annual race began in 1978 and was originally called the Paris-Dakar Rally. For thirty years the race ran from Paris to Dakar Senegal, but in 2009 race organizers changed the location of the race to South America because of security threats along the race-course in Africa. Nasser Al-Attiyah of Qatar won this year’s car race. It was his second victory in the event. Attiyah and his Belgian navigator guided their Mini Rally Cooper across the muddy dirt roads, mountain climbs, and sandy desert sections. Marc Coma of Spain won the motorcycle division for the fifth time.
Newscast: Rio Animals Cool Off K-3
Essential Question: What is happening right now at the Rio de Janeiro zoo?
Vocabulary: herbivores, carnivores, primates, Northern and Southern Hemispheres, equator
Learning Objectives:
– Identify the Northern and Southern Hemispheres on a globe.
– Identify and define the equator as the imaginary dividing line that is halfway between the North and South Poles.
– Define an herbivore as a plant-eating animal and a carnivore as a meat-eating animal.
Summary: The roaming calls of ice cream vendors that can be heard on the famous beaches of Rio De Janeiro have begun to appear in an unlikely new location — the ponds and pens of the city’s main zoo. This summer, Brazil has been experiencing record-high temperatures. Temperatures have been reaching as high as 48 degrees Celsius, or 118 degrees Fahrenheit. In the Jardim Zoologico, Rio De Janeiro’s zoo, two tons of food served in blocks of ice are being distributed daily to the animals to make sure that they survive the heat.
Newscast: Hottest Year on Record 4-8
Essential Question: Why are global temperatures increasing?
Vocabulary: fossil fuels, global warming, greenhouse gases
Learning Objectives:
– Define global warming in their own words.
– Identify carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas that traps heat inside the Earth’s atmosphere.
– Explain how burning fossil fuels leads to rising sea levels.
Summary: Scientists have said that 2014 was the hottest year on record. In fact, the average temperature on Earth last year was about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average Earth temperature during the entire 20th century. Many scientists attribute this increase to global warming, a phenomenon that is negatively affecting many nations of the world.
