Wonderful Weather: Activities for the Primary Classroom

It’s been pretty wet and rainy off and on these past few weeks, but that didn’t stop Mother Nature from showing up and delivering one last AMAZING rainbow for 2016!

We’re taking it as a sign that 2017 is going to be an awesome year!

While we were staying warm and cozy in our pajamas winter break attire, we gave our Wonderful Weather resource a little re-do.

Here’s a peek at our updated Wonderful Weather unit:

We’ve updated all of the Weather Word and Bingo Cards by using photographs instead of clip art. We find that when learning new vocabulary, photographs provide the concrete concepts our students need to comprehend the science vocabulary we are introducing to many of them for the very first time.

We keep our Weather Words up in the class pocket chart for the entire learning unit. Then, they go into our word center for use throughout the rest of the school year.

We’ve provided kid-friendly weather word definitions to help students learn words fast! We print and laminate a few of these to keep around the classroom. They are perfect for building common classroom language to accompany their weather vocabulary. We give them to classroom volunteers when playing Weather Bingo to take the game to a higher level…We give the definition, they cover the word if they have it.

Once we’ve learned our new weather vocabulary, we incorporate activities to practice these new words into our whole group and centers time. Our class loves playing Weather Bingo, and once they are confident with the words, we have them create their own Weather Bingo boards like the one below. They write the word and draw a picture to match. Students can play with their own boards or trade with classmates. These cards can be laminated and used all year, or just copied and kept for the learning unit, then sent home. Our class loves playing Weather Bingo and they don’t even realize how much vocabulary they are learning while playing.

Our class has more opportunities to practice their weather words by working on our weather vocabulary activities during whole class or centers time.

The majority of our weather lessons center around our Wonderful Weather little book. This research reader is copied and provided to each student at the beginning of our science unit. We’ve created two options for differentiated instruction ~ Read and Draw where students simply read for research and illustrate for comprehension or Fill-In where they must use the weather vocabulary word cards and their knowledge to fill in the missing words throughout the book.

One of our absolute favorite additions to Wonderful Weather is our “All About Wind” Read, Write, Create activity. First they use the “Wind” Fact Finders to read and research all about wind. They highlight key information as they go. Next, they gather three facts they learned about wind and add it to their brainstorm page for writing all about wind. Finally, they turn their writing into a windsock that hangs all around the classroom. The kids love this activity and learn a ton about wind in the process!

If you own our Wonderful Weather resource already, be sure to re-download your TpT purchase to get this updated unit.

If you’d like to take a closer look at our Wonderful Weather Unit…

Here’s a few more of our favorite weather activities that we love incorporating into our unit:

The Magic School Bus “Kicks Up a Storm”…I mean, Ms. Frizzle?! The Frizz? Yes way! Need we say more?! This is the perfect launch or wrap up to our weather learning. We bought a set of all the Magic School Bus episodes at Costco, but you can find a lot of them on YouTube too.

We stumbled upon this wind painting idea a few years ago and thought it was hilarious! So naturally, we had to try it and it has been a class favorite ever since. Students start by drawing a bald picture of themselves. Hilarious already if you’ve ever been in a first grade classroom and used the word “bald”. Bahahahahaha…

Provide students with a straw and watered down paint colors to match their hair color. Drop a few spots of paint around their head and let them blow the paint around through your straw. We find watering the tempera paint down a bit helps their little mouths move that paint around a bit faster and doesn’t leave them so winded by the time they’re through!

TEACHER TIP: This is an amazing activity if your class is a little chatty one afternoon. Nobody can talk with straws in their mouths! Joke’s on them…Hilarious!! 😜

It takes them awhile, but they are determined because they think it is so funny!

We hung these in the school hallway right outside the library and titled the board, “Look Who the Wind Blew In!”. Everyone thought it was hilarious!

To wrap up our weather learning, we perform a “Wonderful Weather” show for the entire school during our monthly awards assembly. We use a few songs from this play by Bad Wolf Press.

We are also in charge of decorating the school auditorium bulletin boards for our show, so we have our students write about their favorite weather and create these quick and easy rainbow cloud characters. All they need is a white piece of paper, strips to match the colors of the rainbow, scissors, glue stick, black pen and a pink crayon. Cut (or tear) a cloud shape out of the white paper. Draw a dashed line border around the edge of the cloud. Add eyes, a mouth and pink cheeks with the crayon. Next, wrap the ends of each rainbow colored strip around the crayon to curl them. Adhere each strip to the back of the cloud, so they hang down. That’s it!