Weather Wizards

We took a week to learn about different elements of weather and how they are made.  The first day we learned about wind.  We read the story Gilberto and the Wind and discussed how wind can be helpful and harmful.  We did a picture sort to show both helpful and harmful wind.  We then made these kites.  

The next day we learned about how clouds are formed and discussed the different types of clouds.  We then made these cloud pictures after reading the books It Looked Like Spilt Milk, Little Cloud, and Dreams.

See if you can find the turtle, dinosaur, hearts, basket, dragon, worm, dolphin, snake, cat, butterfly, or pirate ship…use your imagination and see what shapes these clouds make….

    

We did a very fun science experiment to learn about the water cycle and how it rains.  First we read the book Follow a Raindrop then did a drawing of Little Raindrops Adventure and followed the raindrop as it dropped from the sky, was heated up by the sun, (evaporated), then formed into tiny drops of water to make a cloud (condensation), then learned that the cloud gets cold and heavy with drops of water and then fall to the ground again as rain.

 

We used a hot plate to symbolize our “Sun” and how it heats up the water.

Here is our “lake” or “pond” or “puddle” with the pan of water symbolizing these.

We were able to turn off the light and use a flashlight to see the water vapor rising in the air and how a cloud was being formed.  Then we used ice to show that as the water vapor rises it cools off. As it did that, tiny drops of water (condensation) gathered under the pie plate.  Then the drops got heavy and dropped to the floor as rain!

They thought this was pretty cool…but the kids also wanted it to REALLY rain in our classroom!

After reading about rain we moved on to THUNDERSTORMS!  I read the story Thundercake to them about a little girl that was afraid of storms and how her grandmother helped her stop being afraid of the thunder by making a “thundercake”.  I brought the kids a “rainbow thundercake” to eat.  They loved it and then we wrapped up our week of weather with rainbows! 

 

We made our friend “Roy G. Biv” to help remember the order of the colors of the rainbow. 

   

After learning about the raindrops forming “prisms” and the sunlight shining through them to make a rainbow we made some torn art rainbows and wrote about things that are the colors in the rainbow.