Kids Science: Weather Books and activities

I decided that the change of season from Autumn to Winter was a great time to talk about the weather but it took me forever to write this up to share with you.  I went to the library to find a few books to go with some activities that we could do to learn about the weather.

We did a week long learning with different books and different topics.  I started with The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats which we had in a big board book.  Then, we got the book on CD and the movie from the library.  He really enjoyed it.

 

We got these books from the library and you can certainly look for others because every library has different selections.  We went to the section with the weather books and picked the children's books.  In case you want to do the same, we looked in section 551 with the Dewey Decimal system.

The first non-fiction book we read was The Snowflake : A Water Cycle Story by Neil Waldman which was a great story with even better pictures.  Each page was a work of art.  The best part of the story was that there was each month listed with what happens in the month.  We are working on the months so it was great to have them worked into our weather work.

We also read Weather Words and What They Mean by Gail Gibbons.  This book had a comic book style with different blocks with information and the main words at the bottom.  The best thing about this book is that it is fast paced and even taught me some information about weather words including temperature, air pressure, moisture, and wind.  It gives very detailed information about most of the weather that young kids would be interested and moves fast enough for them to stay interested and learn.

We got It's Snowing! by Gail Gibbons which gives you a nice little story while adding some of the weather terminology around on the page.  It was very educational about snow crystals and how the snow flakes are all different.  It talks about all of the different parts of the world as well as more details about how snow happens here.  It ends with talk about how you can have fun in the snow which is what all kids want to hear about.  If the kids get less interested in the technical words, you can skip them and still get a nice story.

The Snow Show by Carolyn Fisher was a little strange but it was about an episode of a show where there is a snow chef cooking up a fresh batch of snow.  The ingredients of wind, dust, water and heat. It is educational but a little imaginary but my son didn't really stay interested.  If you want to learn about the shape of ice crystals and the temperature at which they are formed, make sure you check out this book.

Weather Mania: Discovering What's Up and What's Coming Down by Michael A. DiSpezio, Dave Garbot was almost like an encylopedia of weather knowledge.  It gives information and also different crafts.  Because it was almost 80 pages, it got pushed to the back of the pile many times but it has tons of useful information.  My best advice would be to read it without the kids and then figure out what best applies to them so that you can read the individual sections.

After reading one of the books, we did an activity to pick whether it was summer or winter clothes (found here). He really liked this one and did it again later in the week.

I made gave him an old calendar after we read the Snowflake: A Water Cycle Story to follow up with the calendar and my son decided to take that and use it to write the different things that he wanted for dinner.  I thought it was really amusing but we have two calendars in our family and that is what I do with one of them so I guess he learns from what I do :)  We did go through and talk about the months.

We also made patterns with snowflakes.  I laid out a few and he finished the set.  He really enjoyed it and started making up his own and played with it for a long time. (activity found here)

We also did some Snowy Day crafts.  We cut snowflakes out of scrap paper.  I did mine first and then I fold my son's and he did the cutting where he wanted.  When he couldn't get through the paper, he told me where to cut and what shape to make like triangle, circle or square.  I was going to use paint and put some glitter on them but my son moved on to the next activity too quickly.  I was going to pull them out the next day but I didn't remember (the pains of getting old) but we had fun anyway.  If you are up with all of the new stuff and have glitter glue sticks, this would probably be easier but I didn't even know those we around so I guess I need to get to the craft store to find more fun stuff!!  I didn't take pictures of the snow flakes because I thought that I would when they were all sparkly but since they never did but I am sure you can picture them.

There is stuff all over the web with different activities with snow so feel free to search for your own.  We did a bunch of practice writing pages with the words from Snowy Day from Homeschool Creations.  We traced lines, we practiced cutting, and we picked the first letter of the words.  This was also the site to get the snow patterns and the winter and summer clothes (shown above).

After those were so successful that I pulled out the Read, and Write mats (found here).  My son picked the word from the pile of cut out papers.  Then, we used our letter magnets and made the word and then he wrote it in the bottom box with his little pencil.  He enjoyed doing it but only did two words before becoming bored with how long it took to find the magnets in the pile of magnets.  I told him that he could skip that step if he wanted to pick a word and write it but he said that isn't how you are supposed to do it.  My little rule follower wouldn't bend the "rules." 

I hope that you enjoy some of these books and activities to celebrate winter and now that we have gotten snow, my son really enjoys these even more.  Try a few and let me know which ones are your favorites!

Shared at Mom's Library
and Fun Learning Kids at No Time for Flashcards