Weather Unit in Kindergarten
With the huge variety in weather patterns, I believe anytime is the best time to teach your students about weather! I love using the Weather Time Fun Thematic unit by Kindergarten Kiosk because it allows me to hit all of the standards in a variety of ways throughout my classroom.
First, there are a number of weather songs that you can share with your students. I like to use one a week as part of our calendar time. I will project the song onto the whiteboard with my Elmo and the students and I will sing the song as we point to the words. My students love to sing and it helps me incorporate literacy components as well!
Depending on how long I spend teaching weather, I break the rest of it up into separate components to fit the needs of my classroom. For example, I print off “Tomorrow’s Weather” and “Rain, Rain Go Away” (I print them on card stock and laminate them for durability). Then I can hand them to an aide or a parent volunteer to play with students while I teach reading groups and student’s work on their Station Rotations. These are incredibly helpful as it provides students an opportunity to practice literacy skills with support from an adult. I can also differentiate them to meet the needs of my students. Those students who already have mastered their ABC’s can move forward with reading the CVC words!
Even better, I can take other activities and incorporate them into my Station Rotation’s. “Splashing Puddles” is so fun to use as a whole class Write Around the Room activity. My students squeal with delight each time they find a sight word puddle hidden around the classroom. They run back and forth sharing with their friends what they’ve found. Who doesn’t love to see their kids thrilled with learning?
I’m also a huge believer in teaching students to subitize. It’s in my top 3 favorite words ever! I pull students back during math centers to play “Raindrop Recognition” with them. My students are learning through play and developing these amazing cognitive skills at the same time. This is also a great game to have an aide or parent volunteer use as well.
And you can’t have a thematic unit without art and science! I love using the books mentioned to teach comparing and contrasting to my students. We follow up by going outside to look at the clouds and discuss what kind of clouds are in the sky. Students have the opportunity to learn terms like Cumulus and Cirrus and what they mean. We also take the time to make a cloud. This website walks you through it. Cloud Experiment . After we have read Charles Shaw’s famous book ‘It Looked Like Spilt Milk”, we create our own clouds by folding the white paint on a blue sheet of paper. Students need to analyze what they think their cloud resembles and then write about it. Boom, creativity and critical thinking all in one activity!
Finally, no weather unit would be complete without creating our own weather vane. My students get the biggest kick out of this and love to tell me about what they observed with their weather vane once they take it home.
Seriously, I love this unit. There are so many different ways to use it and individualize it to your own classroom. It’s simple to put together for your classroom and so much learning takes place. My students can’t wait to see what we’ll be doing from one day to the next.
