Simple Study of Daily Weather

Every day we are impacted by this one thing – WEATHER. What we do or how we dress, even our attitudes can be altered by if the sun is shining (or not) and how hot or cold it is.

“Mom, what’s the temp today?”

Most mornings this is what my kids ask when getting dressed, especially my sons, who are going to wear shorts if it is above 20 degrees!

A simple unit to study daily weather with your kids can be a lot of fun. Since it is right outside the door, it requires a very little bit of planning too.

If you want to see why I prefer a simple Unit Study plan you can check out this post or grab the FREE Printable at the end of this post.

Weather Unit Study Objective

Weather is one of the easiest topics to cover just about any time of year. As part of our daily calendars, my kids have always tracked the weather for the month during the changing seasons. We love to use this monthly calendar by Homeschool Creations.

For this study, I choose simply Daily Weather to be our main objective. This includes clouds, water cycles, and storms. Simple!

To dig a little deeper, you can also look at weather patterns, clouds, meteorology, climates, and even climate change.

Books

Since the objective is to focus on the daily weather that we wake up to, I have listed books that are about why the weather changes.

If you have a whole book on Weather, you will find some pages included in there that will be a perfect fit too.

Any of these are great to have on hand and we LOVE National Geographic ones for the amazing photographs.

Don’t forget your local library too – one of my all-time favorite resources.

Weather, The Nature Company
Everything Weather: Nat Geo
How the Weather Works
Oh , Say Can you Say What’s the Weather Today? by Dr. Seuss
Weather Words and What They Mean by Gail Gibbons
The Cloud Book by Tomie de Paola
Clouds by Anne Rockwell

Printables!

Now for some fun printables!!

You want some simple printables that are easy and fun, like print and go. The water cycle is a great printable that shows how our weather impacts the clouds, rain, and bodies of water.

A few free printables I found that fit perfect for this study are:

Grab my Cloud Graphing printable that shows the different types of clouds and helps kids track them for 1 week (check it out below).
Surviving a Teachers Salary has a super cute and simple Weather printable
123Homeschool 4 Me has a terrific Weather pack
First Grade a la Carte has a simple Water Cycle printable to fill in the blanks and color

These are just a few suggestions to make it super stress-free for you!! You can check out my Nature Science Pinterest board for even more easy daily weather unit ideas over there.

You should also have the kids draw and color into their nature journals or notebooks. This is a simple way for them to draw storm types like blizzards, tornados, lightning, or hurricanes.

Daily Weather Activities & Crafts

Having weather right outside your window makes it nice and easy for the kids to observe it daily for this unit study.

Weather Station

One of my sons was given this fantastic Weather Station by his grandmother.

We put this together and it was a lot of fun. This enables kids to:

* see the wind speeds
* check the daily temperature
* measure rainfalls
* document the changes

Storm Jars

Doing this simple “Rain in a Jar” is another fun hands-on activity!

Fill a jar/glass/vase with water
Top it with a generous mound of shaving cream
Add drops of blue food coloring

WALLAH!

Watch it rain.

The food coloring passes through the shaving cream to demonstrate condensation as rain.

Kids love watching the color flow down in swirls.

Clouds & Water Cycle

Crafts are a terrific way to help kids understand the topics of Daily Weather.

Cloud types and water cycles are perfect for giving kids a hands-on glimpse of where rain comes from and what is in the clouds.

Related: Clouds Unit Study

These crafts are also so simple to put together too with little or no prep (give me simple any day, right?)

These crafts and activities can be found in my Nature Science Pinterest board – plus tons of other weather unit ideas!

Here are some other Climate & Weather hands-on science kits that your kids will love!

Simple Daily Weather Study Extra’s

With the days of technology that we live in, there are now so many terrific resources at our fingertips. Here are just a few ideas to check out.

Websites

Just For Kids is by the National Weather Service and has lots of fun activities.
Weather Wiz Kids where you can focus on specific weather types or well-known storms. Sky’s the limit here!
Space Weather Center is another cool site to find interactive activities and information.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac for Kids also has great info. You can follow the moon phases and get animal facts too!
Climate Kids by NASA has weather and more for kids to check out!

Netflix, Hulu, and Prime

After you have done some reading, exploring, researching, and creating you might want to sit back and enjoy some informative TV. Documentaries are so fun to watch and with all of our new streaming options, kids can really find some great ones!

Look for some of these:

Our Planet Earth series
Magic Schoolbus
Strange Weather
NOVA: Decoding the Weather Machine
Science & Weather
Weather for Children

YouTube

YouTube is an incredible resource where there are great educational clips that the kids will love! These are a few of our favorites!

SciShow Kids has a few terrific ones:

Plus a few other great ones:

Learn the Weather for Kids , which is great for your younger kiddos.
Wonder About Weather by Nat Geo Kids

Get the kids out there jumping in puddles, flying kites in the wind, and soaking up the sunrays.

I hope you have fun using these simple Daily Weather ideas to discover the weather that is all around us. It is just screaming to be observed by curious minds.

Let me know what you enjoyed about this study idea by leaving me a comment!

Best,