Weather & the Letter W

Last week began a unit study on weather & Rylan focused on the letter W.

Brady read to us about how Jesus calmed the storm. Living in the South we can have some pretty nasty thunderstorms & I want the boys to know they don't have to fear them, that instead they should pray to Jesus & trust that He will protect them. We also read about Jesus walking on the water & how Peter was able to walk to Him as long as he was looking at Jesus, but once Peter focused on the storm around him, he would sink. I told the boys that no matter how scary things seem all they have to do is trust Jesus & they'll be OK.

Whenever I introduce a new letter to Rylan we sing the fun LeapFrog song "Every Letter Makes A Sound." Then we'll talk about words that start with that letter. Ry loves doing magnet pages & using Do-A-Dot markers to form the letter.

Rylan moves on to practicing the letter formation & then to tracing the letter using a dry erase crayon so he can practice over & over without me having to waste paper :)

 

We also reviewed the W word cards as he traced the W on each one. His writing is improving so much!

 

Rylan also does a great job matching the Scrabble tiles to the letters on the rain drops.

 

He also practiced coloring by number & cutting & pasting pictures that start with a W to his paper. We will add this to a mini Alphabet Picture Book we are putting together.

I also introduced him to Starfall & I couldn't pry the child away!

Rylan used the straw to make Wind to blow the Water (tempura paint) over the Ws. Afterward he dabbed it with a paper towel to make it look like Waves.

 Rylan did lots of counting practice & is doing great recognizing many of his numbers. We counted raindrops & made a counting book by coloring raindrops & tracing the number & the number word. Have I mentioned how thankful I am for the other ladies out there that make such cute learning printables?

 

For Science we reviewed various things that are hot & which are cold His favorite cold thing was a red Popsicle & his favorite hot thing was my coffee.

I checked out a Weather Theme Box from the Resource Center & let the boys explore it all. We reviewed various kinds of weather maps & the different types of weather. We looked at pictures & observed our local weather each day. Most of days were clear & sunny, but we got lucky & got a huge thunderstorm with beautiful lightning we oohed & ahhed over from safely inside & once it passed we saw a beautiful rainbow! 

They loved playing with the different weather instruments that came in the box, especially seeing how fast the anemometer went around when the wind blew. We also watched YouTube videos of weather storms. The boys were AMAZED! We practiced our tornado drill for safety & briefly reviewed the water cycle.   

 I found this cute idea on Pinterest to put shaving cream on top of water to represent the clouds. Then we added blue food coloring & waited for it to "condensate" & then "precipitate." It took a while, but it was worth the wait to see their happy faces when it did!

If you like the printables we used this week you can find them all here: 2 Teaching Mommies, Homeschool Creations, 1+1+1=1, Our Little Monkeys, & Living Life Intentionally. You can also check out my Pinterest board to find lots of other ideas for weather.

We are continuing our weather fun & hope to get another blog up next week about it! I hope you all have a great week! & if you have any fun weather ideas please ship them my way!