Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Weather words


Earlier this week, Itinerant Cryptographer came home and announced, "I signed us up to run the activity at Boy Scouts next week. Our topic is weather."

Now, if you've read this blog before, you know how much I like meteorology! But I'm at a loss for an appropriate weather-related activity to try with a group of third grade boys. So, I consulted with my favorite four-year-old.

"What should Mommy and Daddy do next week to teach about the weather?" In the back of my head floated images of cotton ball clouds, weather station data, and field guides full of bizarre weather phenomena (like lenticular clouds).

Little Brother's response, however, was simple and delivered with great enthusiasm. It didn't matter what the big boys did next week. He wanted to try this today.

"Let's make a weather book!"

So we did. I took one sheet of black construction paper and five sheets of drawing paper, stacked them neatly, and folded them in half so that the black paper formed a cover. Then I punched three holes down the fold and tied some ribbon for the binding. I gave Little Brother a list of 17 weather terms -- like wet, partly cloudy, foggy (can you think of more?) -- to illustrate and let him choose the ones he wanted to copy into his book.

Little Brother did a great job! Here are two of my favorite pages:






Photo credits: Mama Joules. Images courtesy of Little Brother.

2 comments:

LindaLea said...

Looks like a fun project, and he did a great job!

jublke said...

Thanks, LindaLea. He had a great time. I loved snowy (all yellow scribbles because white lines wouldn't show up on white paper), foggy (blue scribbles), and wet (parallel lines of blue water over perpendicular green lines for grass).

It was interesting to see how he interpreted the different weather words and phrases. He seemed baffled by partly cloudy -- he wrote the words but left the page blank.

My very favorite page, which he added later, was mostly cloudy. All of the clouds were carefully drawn and scrunched up very close together.