Spring into Science with a Weather Freebie!

Hi, Teaching Friends!

Is weather part of your science curriculum? Whether it is or whether it's not (sorry, couldn't resist the pun!), the weather is a very real part of our little learners' lives. They hear their parents talk about it every day and they see how it affects their own lives, from what they wear to whether recess will be indoors or outdoors. Even if weather is not an assigned unit of teaching for you, there's a lot of value for your students in teaching about weather and seasons.

Studying weather is a great way to observe and record change over time, which is a skill that applies to other areas of the curriculum. Think about literacy, where we teach our students how to observe changes in characters over the course of a book. How about history, where even our youngest learners will be learning about differences in how people used to live long ago and now? Observing and describing change is an important skill!

Weather and seasons are also a great way to demonstrate the reliability of patterns. Even though weather is not always completely predictable (sometimes hardly predictable at all, it seems!), the cycle of the seasons is a predictable, repeated pattern over time. Even after the kind of winter many of us just came through, spring always follows. The seasons are a pattern. So is the evaporation-condensation cycle. Patterns are a huge part of math, too ... skip counting, multiples, time around the clock, and so many patterns on the hundred chart! 

In reading and writing, the dependability of spelling patterns helps our students apply the onset/rime principle as they decode and spell. Amidst the unpredictability of our English spelling, it must be somewhat of a reassurance to struggling young readers that at least some words have usable patterns!

Story structures are another example of predictable patterns. Familiarity with the days in the week pattern of Brown Bear and the months of the year in Jesse Bear will make other books easier to read and understand. Readers will apply the cumulative pattern of a book like The Jacket I Wear in the Snow as they read similar books.

Even an informal study of weather is valuable as a tool to help us teach our students to build connections across the curriculum.

Here's a free set of weather vocabulary cards! Use them for vocabulary review or alphabetizing, or print two sets for matching and memory games. Or, leave the cards as a whole page and put it in your writing center to encourage writing stories, poems, and non-fiction pieces about the weather. Just click here or on the picture to download and enjoy.

The word cards are part of my Weather Literacy unit, 15 Common Core aligned literacy activities to support your science teaching. Weather phrases for building fluency, fact and opinion sentence strips to sort, riddles for inference, an "I Have, Who Has.." game to reinforce vocabulary, syllable sort, making words, compare and contrast, nouns and adjectives, alphabetical order ... over 70 pages of activities for centers! Click to see it at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

                           

Happy Teaching!