For Parents & Teachers

As the fall winds begin to blow, you can help the children in your life experience
wind and weather using books and some hands-on experiments.

A simple start for younger children is to read Thundercake by Patricia Polacco. In this story the girl is afraid of thunder, and her grandmother distracts her attention from the storm by involving her in the baking of a cake. During the storm, they count the seconds between the lightning flashes and the thunder.

Although the thunder and lightning in a storm are created at the same time, they travel at different speeds. Light travels faster than sound, so we see the lightning before we hear the thunder. By counting the seconds between the flash and the boom, we can determine how far away the storm is.

Provide a flashlight for one child and position him a distance from you. Have him turn on the flashlight and then step toward you, counting as in Thundercake (1000, 2000, 3000) until he reaches you. If he counted to 4,000, the imaginary storm is 4 miles away. Of course, you can use this formula for real when the next thunderstorm occurs.

Encourage the child to write about a stormy experience. Have him describe the storm—the rain, the lightning, the thunder. How did he feel—frightened, excited, or sad that he couldn’t go outside to play?

After reading What Will the Weather Be Like Today? by Paul Rogers, you could have your child begin a weather journal. She could write a few sentences each day (or several times a week) about the weather conditions and also perhaps how they are affecting her. This would be a great project for illustrations as well.

A book by Gail Gibbons called Weather Words and What They Mean provides explanations of weather vocabulary. Some of these weather statistics might be fun additions to a weather journal. Temperature, rainfall, and wind speed could be recorded daily. Averaging the temperature at month’s or week’s end would be a fun math activity.

If your child is interested in observing the daily wind variations, a simple device can be made to do just this. Stake a mini-wind flag stand into the ground in an open area. Punch two holes about 5 inches apart at the top of a piece of cardboard or tag board. Place a key ring through each hole. On another half piece of cardboard, place a plate toward the center of the paper. (It will extend past the top & right edges of the paper.) Trace a curved line around the bottom left-hand edge of the plate. Cut out the curved line. Mark along the curved line in equal distances numbers from 1-6 and attach the paper with strong tape to the flag stand’s vertical metal pole. Slip the key-ringed paper onto the horizontal bar. Then each day, the child can make observations of how high the wind lifts the paper along the curved scale.

Some of my favorite wind books are Earth’s Wild Winds by Sandra Friend; Work of the Wind by David Lambert; and Wind: Causes and Effect by Philip Steele. Some other great weather reads are Bringing the Rain to the Kapiti Plain by Verna Aardema; Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett; and The Magic School Bus Inside a Hurricane by Joanna Cole.