The K5 - elementary education for parents

Toward the end of the school year, as summer approaches, I’m frequently asked for good activities for kids to do that will keep them thinking, using their brains. Nobody wants to inflict sitting at a desk in the corner practicing math drills. But on the other hand there isn’t a parent who wants their kid’s mind to go on vacation.

Here is one of the reported favorites: The Weather Journal.

Get a cheap journal (lined or plain paper). Each morning, have your child write down what the weather is that day, with a description of the conditions. For an early elementary student, it can be a one-word description (sunny) while for a more advanced student the description can be more in depth (sunny and warm with a slight breeze and some clouds). Also, if you’re traveling a lot over the summer, have them write down the location (and that can lead to a study of maps – my personal favorite).

Then, at the end of each week, they can count how many days were sunny, cloudy, windy, and rainy, to see what were the most common weather conditions (3 days sunny, 2 days partly cloudy and 2 days foggy). Pretty simple.

You can also graph the changes. How many sunny days were there? How many cloudy days were there? For this type of example use a bar graph.

Now, if you want to take it to the next level, here are a few ideas.

Buy a small, $5 pocket weather thermometer. Each day, have them write down the morning temperature. Try to do it at about the same time every day. Watch how the temperature changes. Then graph the weather over the summer.

Then, if you want to get really crazy, buy a cheap little barometer. Have them keep track of the barometric pressure every day. And pay attention to what happens. If the barometric pressure goes up, it stays sunny. And when it goes down, a storm is on the way.

Monitoring the weather creates an easy routine for your kid, and they can look back at their Weather Journal and remember what they did on certain sunny, cloudy or rainy days. It provides them an art project to do every morning, develops observational skills, and you can use this activity to teach science, math and language arts.

From K to 5^th grade, the weather journal is an engaging activity. It can be the opening lines of a personal journal (Today it rained in the morning…), a chronicle of a summer that as we all know, can pass quickly and unrewarded upon. Don’t forget to have your children check their Weather Journal against the newspaper or weather.com’s forecast. The following conversation can range from how many days out of the past 7 were sunny to what was the percentage of sunny days to cloudy. Have fun with it.

And it will only cost you less than twenty bucks to put this together. But it will keep them thinking all summer long.