How The Weather Works

One of the topics that we are learning about at the moment is weather (it is one of those background topics that the kids ask about, we do some reading, leave it and a few weeks later we read a bit more).

I wanted to get a good book that we could use for this topic – something that would engage the kids but that had enough detail for my daughter (she would be year 4 if she was in a UK school). I wanted a book that would slightly challenge her and get her to ask questions and think about the weather in a bit more detail. The Core Knowledge Year 3 book suggested a book by Christiane Dorion called How The Weather works. And as I have been impressed with the book recommendations made in my Core Knowledge books I tried my luck and contacted the publishers and asked if they would send us a copy to use. They kindly send us a lovely package of educational books for the kids to use.

And even though I was really wanting this book for my oldest to use, my youngest is fascinated by it. He loves all the flaps and pop up bits. He is especially taken with the hurricane page, I keep finding him sitting on the couch staring at this page, he now thinks hurricanes are incredible.

The book itself is 9 double page spreads (a new topic per double page). It covers

What causes the weather ?

Where does the rain come from ?

What’s a weather front?

Why does the wind blow ?

How can we predict the weather ?

What is a hurricane ?

What is climate ?

What was the climate like in the past ?

Are we changing the climate ?

We are purposely reading this book very slowly as both kids are finding it fascinating and end up asking lots of questions so we really want to try and deal with each set of questions and try to make sure we have covered everything on that topic before we move on. We tend to do one double page spread at a time, often reading the same pages a number of times.

We have spent quite a bit of time talking about the water cycle and my youngest loves the story of the raindrop.

He keeps chirping up with facts like “a raindrop can float around in the ocean for thousands of years.”

Both kids have also found bits about the different clouds very interesting

and as a result we have been doing some cloud spotting of our own.

We download this fab cloud identifier from Twinkl and the kids have been running outside whenever they spot a good-looking cloud and immediately try to identify which cloud it is.

We are currently focusing on the hurricane page (not that my youngest gave me much of a choice about that).

The kids and I are really enjoying this lovely book. And I am thrilled to see that there are other similar ones written by Christiane Dorion. We are definitely going to be adding a few more of her books to our home-education bookshelves.