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!

Circle Story Week

I have to say this might have been one of my favorite weeks of teaching. We had the story If You Give A Pig A Pancake by Laura Joffe Numeroff in our reader so we took all of her adorable books and did an activity with each one of them. I hope the kids enjoyed the week as much as I did! We were very busy!!

 

We started the unit with the first circle story she wrote If You Give A Mouse a Cookie. We then made these cute mice and inside the mouse was the story events sequenced. After reading this story we read If You Take a Mouse to School and did a booklet that had a lot of math problem solving in it.

 

Next we read the two circle stories If You Give a Pig a Pancake and If You Give a Pig a Party. We then made some really cute real and fantasy sentences about pigs…which I forgot to take pictures of.

After reading If You Give a Cat a Cupcake we made these adorable cupcakes with lots of sprinkles on them and sequenced the story events in a circle to map out the story. They loved this activity!

 

 

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Now that we have read through all the circle stories we then did some creative writing of our own. I love to read their ideas. Here is a booklet we made where they paired up an animal with a food and wrote what would happen next.

     

We then took the mouse, the pig, the moose, and the cat and wrote super sentences. We brainstormed describing words for the characters before they started writing. Then they used the sentence wheel to add an action and a place. Then shared them with our friends. As you can see, they LOVE to share their creativity!!

 

 

All of our centers this week were based on the characters from our circle stories too. We worked on a word sort of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, sentence scramble, cookie sort using all the long vowel sounds, school and book sorting using the oo digraph sounds, buying muffins for the moose using money combinations, party time for the pig matching times to the hour and half hour, comparing food that the characters ate using our greater and less than symbols to compare the numbers, and putting cupcakes together to make compound words, and pancake flip putting numbers in order from least to greatest.

What a fun week! We did so many other activities to go with this unit, but of course when you are busy teaching it is hard to get photos of everything we did. Now it is Spring Break…If You Give a teacher a Spring Break she will blog about her wonderful class and blogging will remind her that she has more centers and activities to make so she will need to get to work!

Enjoy the beautiful sunshine and the spring break! See you next week!!