All Things Beautiful: Charting the Weather: a guest post by What Do We Do All Day?

What Do We Do All Day?

Today I have a guest post from What Do We Do All Day?
Because she lives in the city with no car, no yard and a tiny apartment in a big city, she sometimes she has to be creative to keep her young ones busy. We all benefit from her creativity. Today she shares her project on charting weather. This is an activity that is simple and open to a wide age group.

In November Kiddo tracked the daily high and low temperatures on a piece of graph paper. This was fun for him since he is so attracted to numbers and all things weather-related. He liked studying the graph everyday while he ate (it hung and the wall near the table). I think if we do this again, we will use a larger graph (easier for little fingers), but he enjoyed it.

For older kids you could make this into a more advanced project by:

tracking the difference in high and low temperature every day
tracking the discrepancy between the predicted and the actual temperatures
calculating the change in temperature from day to day
calculating the average temperature

For Preschoolers there are lots of fun ways to track the weather, take a look over at this post at Blissful Kids or take a look at the weather wheel Kiddo made two years ago.

Extra Credit Reading:
The Best Book of Weather
If Frogs Made the Weather

What Will the Weather Be?

5 comments:

Christy16.1.11
My son would definitely enjoy this. He is very interested in weather and numbers too.
Joyful Learner16.1.11
I love this and have been meaning to do something similar. For now, we only draw in the weather and write down the high temperature for the day on our calendar.
Ticia16.1.11
I remember doing this at one point when teaching. IN theory we have an indoor/outdoor thermometer, in reality it's hiding somewhere that I don't know where.
Valerie @ Frugal Family Fun Blog17.1.11
What a great guest post! I remember doing this when I was a kid, and it's such a fun hands-on way to study the weather. I'm adding this to our to-do list! :-)
Raising a Happy Child18.1.11
I really like this idea - have to try it out in a couple of years. I remember doing these graphs when I was a kid too.