Weather Unit

E, R, and I spent the last few weeks learning all about weather!

Our main curriculum for this weather unit comes from Moving Beyond the Page Ages 7-9. Moving Beyond the Page is our curriculum of choice and it's what we use for almost all of our units. It's meant for my daughter, E, who is 6, but my son R, who is 3, does many of the activities with us. I also almost always have what we call a "preschool book" that the three of us go through for him. We read and explore it for a week or two and sometimes the topic ties into our unit, as it does for this one.

Because this particular weather unit doesn't cover clouds, I chose Little Cloud by Eric Carle for R's preschool book.

It's a cute little story but doesn't actually give any information about clouds. For that reason, I had some other books on clouds from the library on hand that showed us the basics about clouds - what they are, how they form and the basic types of clouds. With the information gathered, E and R put together cloud books (shown above). I just stapled together some blue construction paper then, using cotton balls, had them make the three main types of clouds, glue one type on each page, write it's name, then on the fourth page, they got to make a cloud in the shape of whatever they wanted. Easy, inexpensive and fun!

Another fun ingredient I added to the mix was this cloud bingo game I bought for $2 on Teachers Pay Teachers. It's a pdf file I printed out, laminated and cut as needed. Then we used cotton balls (aka clouds!) as our bingo markers.

The last activity we did associated with Little Cloud was to cut out and use a cloud view finder similar to this one.

The Moving Beyond the Page weather unit (called Amazing Weather) taught us a lot! Including all about wild weather like hurricanes and tornadoes. Appropriately, the curriculum calls for you to read a short chapter book called Tornado as you work your way through the unit. It's about a dog named Tornado which, not having a dog or being familiar with dogs, was a good opportunity for E and R to learn some dog breeds. I used these 3-part cards for that. And, as I often do, I had some Toob figurines available for the kids to pair with the cards. I used these Toob animals.

 

 

Among many other things, the curriculum also taught us all about weather tools and even had us build a couple of our own - a wind vane and barometer. I was amazed that building the barometer, in particular, out of items we had around the house actually worked to measure air pressure!

 

 

 

 

 

I have so many other weather unit ideas we didn't get to on my weather Pinterest board. Feel free to check it out!