*This is a guest post
Wherever you are in the country, your kids have probably noticed that the weather has been out of whack lately. There has been heat in winter, snow in spring, forest fires in California and ice on the Great Lakes. All this confusion can make the weather especially interesting for kids to learn. If you’ve always wanted to teach your kids about the wonders of weather, there’s no time like the present. Here are ideas.
First, get them a weather app
A high-quality product like this Android weather app may be primarily intended for grown-ups, but it can be a great destination for weather study for a young kid interested in science. If your child has a mobile phone or a tablet play with, it should have a weather app. You can spend time together with your child helping him familiarize himself with different weather phenomena. They will love telling you what the weather will be like when they get the hang of it.
Help your kids design and build weather toys
There are hundreds of ideas for weather toys for bright and curious kids. These can be wonderfully educational not only to use but also to build. An anemometer can be an easy first project, for example. It’s a wind speed measuring device and needs nothing more than a few pencils and plastic disposable cups to construct. You can make an anemometer, a lightning generator or even a cloud tracker, all at home.
Find some to educational weather games
NASA has plenty of educational weather and climate games for kids to play on a computer browser. These games teach children about climate trivia, climate change over time, clouds and hurricanes, among other things. Coming from NASA, these games are well-designed, and can help your children learn so much, not only about weather, but also about energy, the oceans, and much more.
There are even activities that help your kids learn about snow and how to make rain in a glass jar. With simple materials and lots of curiosity, your kids will quickly pick up valuable pieces of insight into how weather works.
Play a game to help children understand the weather and clothing
Helping your kids connect their ideas about weather to the way they should dress to keep the weather out can add a new dimension to their study of weather.
When you connect different kinds of layered winter clothing with the way the weather works, your children will learn how important scarves, socks, and hats are. The more they practice wearing different kinds of clothing for different types of weather, the better they will get working as the straps, hooks, buttons, laces and other fasteners for clothing, and become more self-reliant.
It can help to make these games more interesting to make up a silly song of your own, with the words connecting different weather conditions and different kinds of clothes. It will make you feel better to know that your children know how to take care of themselves and wear the right clothes to protect from different kinds of weather.
