Exploring the weather in preschool
In just one short week of preschool, we had all kinds of weather from very cold and icy to a wonderfully warm day filled with rain and thunderstorms then right back to cold weather again.
Exploring this topic is a great way to transition to playing in the rain with your students!
With so many types of weather it was a good week to promote lots of conversations and explorations about the weather in our classroom. We started our days by reading all kinds of books about the weather that promote conversation like this big book (that I have had for years) titled “Who Cares about the Weather?”.
We discovered that people need warm weather for sailing in the ocean or playing at the beach and cold weather is fun for things like skiing or ice skating. We also discovered that farmers need rainy weather for their crops.
We discovered that there are so many reasons the weather is important for plants, animals, and people too. And because the winter Olympics are currently going on, we especially noticed how the weather was important because without snow and ice, the athletes wouldn’t be able to compete for a medal.
Talking about the weather and reading books about the weather led us to many different things throughout the week including the winter Olympics.
One of our little girls wore her homemade Olympic crown to school and of course we all had to make one too!
Our crowns were just a little different but the children loved using our gold and silver glitter paint to glue on leaves and decorate their crowns.
Talking about the weather led to talking about the winter Olympics which led one of our students to also bring in a pair of skis for the children to check out.
Everyone took a turn to try on the snow skis to “ski” across our red winter carpet! Â One tip from our experienced little skier was that it is important not to let your skis crisscross or you will fall over.
Keeping our skis straight was a big challenge but the children did a remarkable job and everyone loved getting a chance to try the skis out and once again, we learned that skiers care about the weather and to really ski, we would need real snow.
Our adventure in weather went on all throughout the week but one thing that I made sure we did was gather up as many icicles as we could before the warm-up set in and they would all melt. Good thing too because the day after we explored our icicles, the temperature jumped up and all the remaining icicles that were outside hanging from around the school all melted away.
We had big icicles and little icicles to explore. We held the smaller icicles in our hands to see if we could use our warm hands to make the icicles melt and drip water.
The very big icicles (which are rare for us to find) were too big to hold so we explored them in a tub.
The children thought it would be fun to see what would happen if we painted the big icicles. Some of the children guessed it would make the icicles melt but instead, our paint just dripped right over the top and down into the tub leaving us with muddy looking and very cold icicle water.
And of course, everyday we went outdoors to experience the weather too. One of our favorite things to do is to climb our snow mountain (which is now slowly starting to melt).
Of course, our weather may be different than your weather but regardless of the type of weather you are experiencing where you live, giving students a chance to explore the weather through real and meaningful hands on explorations and drawing connections to events such as the winter Olympics or vacations the children have been on is always a great learning experience.
We spent time creating and exploring the weather all week. Some of our experiences were more abstract and some were more real but all of them were fun and engaging. Â More about the weather coming to you soon!
Available on Amazon
Who Cares About the Weather (Macmillan Early Science Big Books)