A Week Of Weather Learning

In Kansas you never know what to expect from our weather and coming back from spring break was a perfect time to introduce the weather concepts. We had snow flurries, wind, rain, lots of stratus clouds, and finally some sunshine to finish our week back to school. As I post this we had 87 degrees today and now it is down to about 50 and the wind is blowing like crazy with lightning and thunder. Makes me want a “thundercake” right now. Here is a look at all the learning that went on in our classroom this week.

During centers we listened to Franklin and the Thunderstorm and then made as many real words that we could out of the word “thunderstorm”. We worked on contractions with “twisters”, rainbow compound words, weather sentence scramble, and making real and nonsense words using word families of long e.

Using literature to introduce the different elements of weather was a lot of fun. Especially the story by Judi Barrett, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs…we then used our imagination to make up a crazy town name and wrote what we thought would fall from the sky at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

After learning how clouds are formed and reading these books we created these really cute pictures with this story starter. Can you see the ice cream cones, tornado, cat, butterfly, flower, squirrel, bug, tree, honey bee, dragon, or shamrock? Or are they just clouds in the sky?

You need to ask your child how we made it rain in our classroom! Here is what we did. We used a hot plate to represent the sun. A pan of water to represent a pond, lake, or puddle, and a pan of ice to represent the cool air in the sky or a cloud that has been formed by the evaporation of the water. When the sun (hot plate) heats up the pond or lake (pan of water) we were able to see the water vapor rise in the air as it evaporated. We used the plate with ice and pretended it was a cold cloud. We put the cold plate on the pan filled with hot water.  When we did this it caused the water to condense under the pan and when we lifted it up it RAINED in the classroom! They thought that was pretty neat!

After reading about how rain is formed we had to talk about thunderstorms and how they can be kind of scary. I read them a story called Thundercake about a little girl that visits her grandmother on a farm and a big thunderstorm was coming. She was really scared and hid under the bed. Her grandma helped her overcome her fears of thunderstorms by gathering all the things to make a “Thundercake” We did some cause and effect activities and then got to eat the “thundercake” that I made for them. Yummy!

 

We finished up the week of weather learning about rainbows and how they are made and with the help of Roy G. Biv we learned the order of the colors of the rainbow. We also put on a play about learning the colors of the rainbow in order.

I also made 7 layer jello with the colors of the rainbow and we LOVED eating it! It was a fun filled week!

We finished up with these rainbow poems using the colors of the rainbows. They wrote what reminds them when they see that color. They were very cute!