Winter weather ***Outdoor Hour Challenge***

Our weather today:

Sky:  Rain clouds/overcast

Temp:  51*

Wind:  SSE 8mph

Precipitation:  .44 inches

Sunrise:  7:29am

Sunset:  5:22pm

To start our winter weather study today we read "Snoflake Bentley".  Since we don't really ever get snow here (maybe once a winter), I thought it would be fun to just look at a glimpse of snow through this book.  It is all about a man who loved snow, and captured tiny snowflakes in pictures.  A great story.  My daughter didn't realize at first that he was looking through a camera in that picture.

Then, the kids painted with "snow flakes" (tied together sponges), to make a wintery snow scene.
Something like this:

These are the sponge 3D snowflakes:

Here Miss A8 is making her first dip:

Mr. A3 really liked this sponge painting, and he is the one that requested green in his color scheme:

The Rainy Winter Walk

Now for the real winter weather challenge!  We took a lovely rainy walk.  It was so nice, especially because it was actually over 50.  We get a lot of rain where we are, that's what most of our winter is--months and months of rain.  Some days we love it some days we don't.  It was a light sprinkle today.

He didn't want anything to do with that umbrella, we just left it home:

We made up a name for these, raincicles:

I bet you didn't know you could ride a bike and skate in the rain while walking to the library:

A parking lot with a lot of puddles is a lot of fun to ride through:

We even stopped at our favorite little garden spot to take a gander, it was muddy, but oh so fun:

And, OH, were we surprised!  This tree has some pink on it!  We couldn't believe our eyes!

A happy glimpse that Spring, in fact, is on its way!

Look at those beautiful blossoms:

There was fun to be had by everyone:

Our new chart for February.  We are going to keep track of the weather each day, and see which kind of weather happened the most in the month of February.  To make it fun we are using some fun stickers that have different weather patterns on it for my preschooler:

Then, finally, I had my 3rd grader make a cube of seasonal circles found here.  Here she is making 6 circles for the cube:

Then, on each circle she drew a picture of the weather from each season of the year, and since there were 2 extra circles I had her draw 2 extra winter circles.

We tossed the cube a few times for a short game.  Whatever season it landed on we had to say the first word that came to mind.  For my preschooler, we tossed it to see if he could remember what season it was by the pictures on it.  There are probably some other games that we'll come up with over time.  Maybe we'll play the alphabet game with it, we like that game.

Here is the Winter weather study notebook page my 3rd grader did.  She drew the winter scene in our neighborhood.  At first it was just clouds and rain and wind.  I asked her if that was it, is there nothing else around us, I say?  She laughed.  There's no trees, no mud, no cars?  She laughs again.  She says:  don't look!  So, I go out and she draws McDonald's :-)  I laughed.

To see more winter weather outdoor challenges visit the Handbook of nature study.

I'm also linking up with naturally curious tots as it fits in with their seasons study too.

 
Home schooling one day at a time--as long as it takes

Desiree