Learning At Home: Weather

Last November, our homelearning revolved around the fascinating theme of weather, one of my personal favourites. With the volatile weather in November, it was the perfect month for the Bees to experience first-hand what they had learned! 

Featured books

There are so many fantastic books on different types of weather. Books that the Bees particularly like are:

Crazy About Clouds (recommended for bigger kids, with such an easy and engaging way of recognising different cloud types!)

I Love The Rain 

The Snowman (highly recommended with such a sweet and meaningful storyline)

Lost In The Snow

Key songs

Mr Sun

Rain rain go away

Games

We indulged in so many fun games that ultimately taught them a bit about weather. We played more frequently with bubbles so they were able to learn the concept of wind, as they chased merrily after the bubbles that drifted randomly off in different directions. 

The most enjoyable game for them was when Hubby took out a can of shaving cream and started spraying out the soft white foam for them to squish and squash like snow! Lots of delighted squeals emanated from the 2 excited girls as they took turns squeezing out the shaving foam, accumulating it to a huge mass of avalanche, attempting to build a snowman (but the foam was too soft!) and finally, indulging in some role-playing of battling dinosaurs during the Ice Age! That was a fun evening, all orchestrated by Hubby :) 

Creating an avalanche of snow!

Guess who's the victorious dinosaur that buried its fierce competitor in the snow?

Weather recognition

I created a weather wheel with a piece of paper, cardboard and a pin (and Big Bee coloured everything!). Then I made the Bees turn the arrow to the correct weather twice a day. They loved it so much. This is a wonderful way to strengthen their recognition of different types of weather through repetitive reinforcement. I should have included the words of the weather like "sunny" or "snowy" to fortify Little Bee's recognition of words though. 

Craftwork

Little Bee created a vibrant sun using a paper plate which she painted yellow for the sun's jolly face, and handprint cut-outs as dazzling sunrays. She also stuck on white round stickers and doodled in Mr Sun's eyeballs and a brilliant smile. I wrote down numbers for each sunray, and got her to identify each number as she was sticking on the handprints. This is a subtle and fun way of enhancing her number recognition. 

Because it was a holiday month, I got lazy and just took put pieces of coloured paper, paints and cotton wools for them to produce works of art relating to weather with minimal guidance from lazy Mummy. I simply instructed them on the types of weather to work on, then Big Bee would zoom off to innovate her version of art, with Little Bee always emulating what the jie jie drew. 

"Pitter Patter Rain" by Big Bee, using white cotton pads (i could not find fluffy cotton wools at home!), white paint and blue glitter

"A Tempestuous Day" by Little Bee

"A Snowman Calling For His Christmas Tree" by Big Bee using white paint

"S for Snowman with an Oversized Hat" by Little Bee. She also tried drawing clouds and snowflakes like her sister, in case you are baffled!

"Tumultuous Storm Cloud" by Little Bee

I tried to ensure that they covered all aspects of weather, so we also painted rainbows using poster colours, and I explained to them how rainbows were formed. Little Bee grasped the concept well and when I asked her what were needed for rainbows to form, she was able to spontaneously yell out "sun" and "raindrops" (although technically it should be droplets of moisture!). 

Math: Join the dots and recognising numbers to 12

Little Bee started working on "join the dots" activity sheets, and she was able to count in sequence from 1 to 20. The challenge lies in getting her to recognise these numbers, and this activity helped as she happily connected all the dots of the sun while reciting her numbers. Her colouring skills need improvement though! She does not have much patience to colour, I notice. 

Writing and letter recognition "r"

I am trying to teach her all the lower case alphabets and she is now able to recognise most of them. For this theme, we worked on the letter "r" for "rain" and "rainbow". We rolled our tongues for the "r" sound and Little Bee wrote a series of "r" in this handy little writing book. 

Meteorology

One of my career ambitions when I was younger was to be a meteorologist, before I sadly realised there are limited weather systems to explore in Singapore! Hence, I used to delve into weather science a far bit in school, and cloud studies with associated weather systems was one of my favourite topics. 

With Big Bee, whenever we were out, I would point out different cloud types for her and got her to help identify some of the easier cloud types. We even tried our hands at weather forecasting, merely by looking at the clouds high above us and feeling the direction and speed of the wind around us. 

Big Bee was thrilled and was able to identify the major cloud types by the end of the month and could associate simple weather patterns to them (eg huge cumulus nimbus clouds with grey bases could mean potential showers soon). We were very lucky in November as the weather changed its temperament quite regularly, so we could capture myriad cloud types. 

This is an excellent site for big kids to learn about cloud types with fun games and digestible information for parents and kids to talk about! 

Field trip: Kite flying!

We ended this theme with a grand finale of kite-flying in Marina Barrage. That was truly a fantastic conclusion to this theme, on an amazingly blustery day with different types of clouds tumbling past rapidly!