Making Weather Charts in Preschool

Last week our theme was Seasons and Weather.  Actually, it turned into more of a "Seasons and Weather" theme, because there was just a lot going on with that alone.   Plus, the last time I tried to talk about a season  I realized that nothing outside was reinforcing what I was saying to the Little People anyway.  So I decided to leave the Winter talk until it actually is acting like winter outside, and focused on the just the weather.  Because as we all know, no matter if it is exactly what we are expecting or not, we always have weather.

I decided before the week began to cover one different type of weather each day on Monday through Thursday, and then review on Friday.  And believe it or not, the weather outside was very cooperative.  On Monday we were focusing on sunny and it was sunny.  On Tuesday we did cloudy and it was cloudy.  Wednesday was Rain Day and amazingly - it was rainy.   Thursday was Partly Cloudy, and it was - well, it was just cloudy.  However, three out of four is not bad at all.

Our big project for the week was to make a weather chart, and so we made one section a day as we talked about the different types of weather.

On Monday we made our sunny pictures.  I put out die-cut suns and the Little People spooned paint on them. I then placed a piece of waxed paper on top and then they squished the paint all around, leaving suns that looked like this:

Later in the week the Little People added sun rays to them.  I must admit that I really had a hard time when some of them started repainting their suns and covering up their previous fantastic paint jobs, but I took a deep breath and let it go.

Tuesday was cloudy.  We made clouds by painting gray paint onto white paper with shower poofs.  Later I cut these papers into clouds (since the Little People aren't big into cutting yet).

Wednesday was Rain Day, so we provided umbrellas, raindrops and markers and let them go to work:

On Partly Cloudy Day the materials were die-cut suns, cotton balls, and lots of glue.  I find that I don't have a picture of those, except for on the finished products:

(Sorry those picture are so blurry.  I'm needing to make my pictures much smaller right now because I have apparently run out of picture space on Blogger.)

I decided to go with the printed labels for weather names because a)they look nice and b)I can save this computer file for next year.  Hurray for saving time!

The arrows are cut from fun foam.  I made the hole in the middle of the chart with an "everywhere hole punch" from my scrapbooking stash.

Even though these were a lot of work to finish up, I think they turned out wonderfully.  We used our sample pictures to make one for our classroom, so hopefully the kids will take the language they hear every day during weather time home and use it with their own chart.