Weather Wizards

Weather is the topic for the second graders right now and so I decided to throw in a little research and text feature practice along with it. I created a scavenger hunt for them to work on in pairs using different books on weather. They had to find answers to questions such as:

• write down three words in your index and the pages they are found on,
• find one caption in your book and tell what it is talking about,
• what is the copyright date of your book,
• why is it important to notice if there are words in bold,
• find three interesting facts about your type of weather, and
• what is the first listing on your table of contents.

They got right to work and seemed to stay interested and involved in the project the entire time! Here are some photos of work in progress.

There are also a ton of excellent online sources for weather geared toward kids. Scholastic has an interactive weather maker that lets kids see what happens when temperatures change and humidity changes in a picture of a house that can go from sunny to rainy to snowy depending on the settings they choose. Weather WizKids has several aspects that make it a great resource including information on many types of weather in kid friendly language, along with weather experiments, flashcards, instruments, folklore, and more. This site is worth checking out for the weather experiment ideas alone. Weather Channel Kids is a site for online teacher resources, a weather encyclopedia, questions and answers about climate change, and more. NOAA's Weather for Kids is more of a collection of resources you can check out to find more. Tree House Weather Kids from the University of Illinois is a kid attractive site with lots to explore. There is so much here it is hard to summarize, but it is worth checking out. This is a site kids can explore or you can look around it as a class on a white board. It includes things from weather comics to information to video clips to teacher resources.