One of my favorite science units to teach at the end of the school year is on weather.
There are so many interactive lessons and activities that my students can participate in. It's wonderful! It's also easy to tie in lessons on clouds and storms with the weather we currently have at the end of the school year. My students love making those real life connections.
Below are just a few activities/resources I use with my 3rd graders.
1. Check the weather each day for 1 week and record on their chart. They will also use this to create a graph that will go in their weather lapbook.
I have my students log into weather.com. This can also be loaded onto a classroom iPad and students can easily check the weather on this device.
2. Videos on different kinds of weather
National Geographic has terrific video resources on different types of weather. They are easy to find and some last from 1 minute to 5-10 minutes. These are perfect for introducing a lesson on a particular type of storm. To find these videos simply go to National Geographic.com and click on the search videos button on the top right hand of screen.
3. Weather experiments
Students create their own rain gauges to use at home and collect date for the week. Weird Science Kids has a great website for a student made rain gauge. Just click here for the link.
We also make rain clouds in the classroom with food coloring. This is so much fun and super easy.
Hilary's Home Daycare and Preschool has an awesome tutorial on this activity. Don't let the age range fool you, my 3rd graders loved this! Click Here to go to the link.
4. Create Scavenger Hunts on online weather websites for kids.
My students love to work in groups and complete a scavenger hunt on an online website. This is great to get the students to read and look at all the information a website may offer. Sometimes my students get stuck just looking at the pictures or searching for the games that a site may offer and never really getting to the great information. So I create a scavenger hunt. Students are given a sheet of paper with questions that ask them about information that can be found on this particular website. Students work together in groups to find this information. Listed below are some great weather websites for children. Just click on the names below to check out these amazing sites.
5. Weather Lapbook to record all the information my students learn about weather.
I created this fun lapbook for my students to use. It also comes with a weather workbook. This lapbook helps my students keep the information they learned at their fingertips and provides for a great study guide before their weather assessment. You can find "Weather and Meteorology 101 Lapbook and Student Workbook Mega Pack" in my TPT store. Just click on the picture below or click HERE.
I would love to hear about the resources you use to teach weather in your classroom!
1 comment:
Bookmarked this post since we also learn about weather. As we use FOSS, there is little time to sneak in the 'good stuff' but I am definitely going to try! Thanks for sharing your resources!
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