Wild and Wonderful Weather: Odds and Ends

Some things from our weather unit that did not get included in previous posts...

Clouds
We spent a couple of days on clouds and will probably study them more in depth this summer.

We read The Little Cloud by Eric Carle and the girls made some beautiful cloud art. For one piece they dipped a cottonball into white tempera paint and stamped onto blue construction paper. I clipped the cottonballs to a clothespin, making it a little less messy. Then they had the idea of gluing some cottonballs onto blue paper. I thought these both turned out really nice.


Another book we really enjoyed was The Man Who Named the Clouds by Julie Hannah. This was a good one for introducing us to the different cloud types.

We visited Amanda's Cloud Art Show at Hearts and Trees. She's put together a beautiful collection of artwork based on this theme.

Severe Weather
Towards the end of our weather unit we touched briefly on hurricanes and tornadoes. Thanks to Mrs. Frizzle and her Magic School Bus, it wasn't a scary topic. :) We read The Magic School Bus in a Hurricane, and it quickly became a favorite.

Tornadoes are mentioned in the story, so we made a tornado in a bottle. I picked up a tornado tube connector at the local school supply for $3.00, and it was well worth it. If you don't have the tornado tube you can also place a washer between the two 2-liter bottles and then duct tape them together.

This experiment was the unanimous favorite from our whole unit. They're still playing with it even though we made it weeks ago.


Swirl the bottle to get the funnel going.


We added 2 tbsp. of red lamp oil to the water to make the tornado easier for the camera to see. I've also seen people add glitter or nothing at all, and the effect is still really neat.


If you've never tried the tornado in a bottle, I really encourage you to. It is so easy and sure to get rave reviews from your family. :) Let me know what you think if you try it!

You can read more about our weather adventures in these posts.

Have a great day!