weather pre-k 4

Ana's Week

I am so grateful to Jessica for reminding me that Groundhog Day was February 2nd, because doing a weather unit this week was a perfect match to the holiday. We stayed busy this week, with something going on every day, so we didn’t spend as much detailed time on the weather as perhaps we should have. However, we did some fantastic science experiments, made some great cloud artwork, and Aria knows basic weather terms and why there is a Groundhog Day (and how many more weeks of winter we get this year), so we did get some good learning time in when we could.

My favorite activity of the week was making cloud artwork with Aria. She didn’t necessarily know the names of all of the clouds by the end of the activity, but she was extremely focused for a good 45 minutes on painting, gluing, cutting, and practicing clearly speaking cloud names. Any time that I can get Aria to focus on an assignment that long, I really try to count it as a teacher win, because that’s a really long time for a preschooler to do one activity. Plus, she was so proud of her painting at the end and showed it off to everyone who came over.

Other than Aria absolutely loving to watch Phil and trying to convince us to buy Skylar a groundhog for her birthday, her favorite activities were based around the science experiments. She loved the rain in a jar activity we did, where she dropped blue food coloring onto a water filled glass with shaving cream on top. Even Skylar got into it and had a blast dropping the food coloring and see it turn into “rain.” The wind science activity was another big hit. Aria ran around the house and found loads of items to blow around with a straw. She would make a “hypothesis” on which would move farthest and then test it out. Then, we would talk about why some moved father than others. Skylar loved blowing through the straw to make wind, though as you might guess, she was less effective!

The last thing we did this week, which I highly recommend, was have Aria watch a meteorologist and then pretend to be one and make guesses for what the weather would be each day of the week. Through this, she was able to practice her speech, which is good because this week we took her to see a speech therapist and learned she needs to work on enunciation and pronoun usage. We were also able to encourage Aria’s love of drama and pretend play, which is something so important in the preschool years. Jessica’s ideas for meteorologist play are amazing, and I highly recommend you try them out in your home too!
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Well, looks like we are in for six more weeks of winter, if Phil is right, which is lucky since it’ll be a while until we get to our spring units! Can’t say I’m sad because I am just so grateful we got snow this year and some truly cold weather, which is unusual for us. This was not our most successful week, but a fun one nonetheless.