Wonderful Weather

Our Southern California weather is a funny thing…

You might already be laughing and asking yourself,

“Weather? You have weather?!?”

Contrary to popular belief, it does drizzle rain in Southern California.

And snow.

And earthquake.

Don’t worry.

We know earthquakes aren’t weather.

But, you’ve got to give us Californians something.

We‘ve been orphaned by Mother Nature…we don’t have much.

And, we have to admit, we do get slightly jealous of all these so called, “Snow Days” as some of you call them...We have no idea what they even are, but we know they involve snow and days off school...Both sound wonderful to us!

Since our big first grade “Wonderful Weather” performance last Friday , we’ve been strutting our Meteorologist minds in class by working through our Wonderful Weather Unit for the Common Core Classroom.

Building essential academic vocabulary and hands on activities helps all of our students gain a better understanding of these abstract weather concepts.

And, by “abstract” we mean non-existent. As in, no weather for us to point to, reflect upon…Nothing. Honest. Have you ever taken your class outside for a wonderful cloud lesson only to find not a cloud in the sky? We have.

And, no jet exhaust does not pass as clouds. We’ve tried.

We’ve revamped this unit a bit and added several pages, so if you’ve already purchased be sure to update your file and enjoy the new extended, Common Core aligned version.

Wonderful Weather includes 21 pocket chart friendly vocabulary picture cards.

5 pre-made Weather Bingo cards for reinforcing weather vocabulary words and definitions in a small group.

After lots of practice with our vocabulary cards and pre-made Bingo cards, we also create our own Weather Bingo cards. It helps us strengthen the vocabulary by writing and illustrating our own playing cards. It has been great for our English Language Learners too.

We place these in our centers rotations at first, then allow them to play independently as time allows. Towards the end of our unit, we will play whole class as a culminating, “fun” activity. They also love switching cards with their friends and playing various versions like four corners, diagonal only, or cover ’em all.

We realize it cannot be all fun and games, so we’ve also included several other activities to blow them through the curriculum.

We will write five narrative stories about why we love each type of weather, including a descriptive story about our favorite weather. We’ve included writing pages for each story and both full color and printer friendly book covers for binding or bulletin board posters for story display in class.