Wild Weather!

Because I am from Yorkshire, I am obviously an expert on the weather. I must be, I spend at least half of my day talking about it. And I love it all- the wild wind, the snow (especially the snow), the heat waves (too few and far between) and even the rain showers. What I love the most are tornadoes and hurricanes and crazily named storms, and, funnily enough, extremely violent weather seems to be quite a hit with children.

Below are a few ideas to help you get started with a wild weather topic. Please remember that you do not need to be an expert at anything you are teaching to your children- you simply need to be enthusiastic about the subject and willing to learn alongside them. In fact, the learning becomes even more meaningful if you do it together.

Without further ado, here are a few ideas to catapult you into becoming ‘wild weather experts’:

·        Study different weather patterns around the world- start with America and ‘Tornado Alley.’ Watch Youtube clips of storm-chasers and get excited when their trucks nearly get blown away

·        Make a video/podcast in which you get dressed up and ‘do’ the weather report using silly wigs and a world map

·        Learn about the water cycle and changes of state in science

·        Link to learning about day and night and seasons (Earth and space - KS2 Science - BBC Bitesize)

·        Look at statistics- rainfall bar-charts, temperature line graphs- think about what those numbers really mean

·        Challenge yourselves to learn something spurious – the names of the different types of cloud or the average night-time temperature in the Nevada desert… just because it might come in useful one day.

·        Write an explanation text which details how a tornado is formed. Add diagrams and drawings.

·        Write a newspaper report about a wild weather event.

 Hopefully these ideas will get you started and when you do create something wonderful, please send it to me and I will post it into my ‘outstanding gallery.’ 😊