Weather Lessons

We have just finished up our weather unit.  Most of this unit was posters, worksheets, and watching little movies.  There were a handful of good experiments which our curriculum suggested.  One of them we did was on different kinds of participation.  For sleet, we crumbled up little pieces of paper.  For snowflakes, we had little one inch square pieces of paper.

The girls threw both the sleet and snow in the air at the same time.  Every single time the sleet landed on the floor first and the snow flakes floated down. 

The wind lesson included a little computer simulation of a house as the wind level went from "calm" all the way to "hurricane" on the 12 stages of the Beaufort Wind Scale.  The girls loved watching this video.  As the wind progresses, the leaves on the trees flutter, than blow off.  The branches on the trees blow off, then eventually the tree is uprooted.

Also on the video, there is a flag in front of the house.  It starts out stationery during "calm" and eventually gets blown away by the "hurricane" level wind.  Several days after we did that lesson, the girls found a flag in our garage.  Catherine held it still and told me "this is calm."

 Then she slowly waved it and said "this is breeze:"

 Then she waved it as hard as she could and said "this is hurricane:"

I love when I see evidence that she is learning what I am teaching her!