Your local newspaper is an excellent segue into the science behind and importance of meteorology. Create a lesson plan about meteorology for a Thursday or Friday before a major holiday. Ask students to discuss their weekend plans and find out if anyone is planning to travel over the weekend. Open the newspaper to the weather section and have students examine and discuss what the paper says the weather will be over the holiday. Get a copy of a national paper like USA Today to examine the weather for major cities across America. Talk about how weather influences travel plans and then discuss how meteorologists make weather forecasts. Introduce students to the concepts of radar and satellite imagery through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's website. Have students practice locating and reading the weather for the city they're traveling to. Use the lesson plan as an opportunity to involve your class in the GLOBE program
Gather local newspapers from the past month or collect the daily paper in advance for one month in preparation for the lesson plan. Save the weather section from each paper. Have students use the daily weather report showing the temperature for each day to find the temperature variation that your city experienced over the past month. Have students use graph paper to chart all the highs and lows for each day for the past month, based off the weather reports in the local paper. Compare their findings to historical weather data about the temperature variation in your city to see if the past month was in line with previous years' temperatures. Introduce students to the possibility of global warming and explain that scientists have discovered warming in the lower atmosphere and cooling in the stratosphere. Explore what it would be like if that trend affected your city so students experienced higher highs and lower low temperatures.
Use newspapers to complement a lesson plan about a specific area of science your class is currently covering. Ask students to use your library and online resources to locate newspaper articles about that area of science. Specifically. have students create a portfolio of breakthroughs or "firsts" catalogued in the newspaper about that area. For example, if you are studying genetics, tell students to look for newspaper articles about Watson and Crick or DNA and RNA technology breakthroughs.
The newspaper is a helpful tool to complement a lesson plan examining bioethics or ethics involved in science generally. Talk about major issues stoking debate in science - the ethicality of cloning, cryogenics, gene manipulation therapy and evolution. Charge students to look for articles about one of these issues and to write a short research paper which summarizes the scientific research and advancements about a given issue, as well as ethical debate swirling around that topic, as evidenced in the newspaper.