It's been a lighter load this summer, just due to family visits, outside camps, and playdates, but we are still doing a little bit so schooling. We spent about 3 weeks on Weather, learning about temperature, cold fronts/warm fronts, air pressure, precipitation/water cycle/dew point, relative humidity, extreme weather (tornados, hurricanes, blizzards, etc.), and forecasting. What took me by surprise was that my kids had never watched a weather report on TV! Admittedly, we don't watch much TV, so that's probably why, but also, with iPads and smartphones, we've always used weather apps to get our forecasts!
We used a variety of books to do some hands-on demos and read about various weather-related topics:
The
National Weather Service also has Learning Lessons with printouts to use for making weather maps, so we practiced making isobars and isotherms using their maps.
Here's a couple of our projects:
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| Homemade Thermometer |
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| Assembled Weather Station Kit |
We incorporated other subjects into this unit with the following:
- Writing: Use weather in a story
- Math: convert Fahrenheit to Celsius and vice versa
- Computer Skills: Excel graph of temperature change
- Greek root words: meteor, bar, meter, therm, hydro.
- Chinese words: rain, snow, hot, cold, temperature, degrees, clear, cloudy, clouds
It was a fun and practical unit!
