Thursday 27 February 2014

Let's Talk About the Weather

http://thetigerchronicle.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/science-weather

After we've decided that to focus on weather study this term, we started back at the beginning of the topic and looked at weather in general.


As we have been familiarising ourselves recently with information from the Met Office, we decided to find out more about what they do:


and how they create a weather forecast:


as well as what a meteorologist might do:


The weather has significant impact on human activities, as we learnt here and here.  Since knowing about the weather is so important, we thought we ought to approach the topic properly, i.e. to start by checking with the Met Office what the basic components required to make our own weather station are:
  1. a rain gauge - we've made that!
  2. a wind vane
  3. a thermometer
  4. a weather diary
Coincidentally, Tiger had started to put together a table to record the weather a few days ago, so he was delighted to paste the printed sheet in his nature journal instead.


We added an extra colum, 'humidity' to the record sheet since we have also made our own hygrometer to measure that.

Going through the list of the basic components for a weather station, we still need to make our own wind vane and use a thermometer to measure the daily temperature.  Although we can use the dry bulb thermometer from our hygrometer for this purpose, we wanted to do an easy experiment so we made the water thermometer.


Next up was the weather vane to measure the wind direction. 


It has been very windy here these days, so it didn't take long to see the wind vane at work:



This post is linked up to:
  1. Nature Study Monday: Squash Discoveries NSM!
  2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 2/25/14
  3. Geography and History Meme: United States geography ideas
  4. Entertaining and Educational - Colorful Icicles
  5. Collage Friday - Blessings Amidst Difficulties
  6. Weekly Wrap-Up: The One with the Baby-Sitting and Fort Building
  7. Homeschool Mother's Journal (3/1/14)
  8. Science Sunday: What to do when your experiment fails

16 comments:

  1. Those are great projects. We did some similar projects at the beginning of the year. Lately we've been reading the book; Flood Wrestling with the Mississippi. Your flood books inspired us and this book is fantastic.

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    1. Thank you for sharing your experience, Julie. I'm glad you're reading more about floods. It's a topic that doesn't come up very often at the elementary age but is very relevant nonetheless.

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  2. Wonderful. This has me itching to do some more practical science. We've been reading about relativity and the Universe recently which has been really interesting but not very hands-on! I love how accurate weather forecasting has become in the last few years. I plan our dog-walks around my Met Office phone app!

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    1. I'd imagine you guys are learning loads from reading about relativity and the Universe. Those topics don't lend themselves very well to hands-on activities, at least not that which can be easily replicated at home. :-) It is indeed very helpful that the forecasting is getting more accurate these days. The ever-changing weather condition in this country makes the topic a fascinating one to study.

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  3. I love your wind vane, what a simple and educational idea, I remember doing this at school but had quite forgotten. Thank you, I might have to try it out on my kids.

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    1. I hope you'll try it out, Fiona. As you said, it's such a simple activity to illustrate the point, but it works well. :-)

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  4. This looks like so much fun - I always wanted to build a weather station with the girls, but for various reasons it never happened, and they've kind of outgrown most of what I want to do now! I'm hoping in a few years I'll get a chance with my nephew... homeschooling does offer so many opportunities :)

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    1. There's not enough time to learn everything, so we have to make the most of the opportunities for learning that arise. :-) I think you're doing a fantastic job with your girls in terms of learning the different cultures by way of after-schooling. You're already doing much more than most people! :-)

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  5. Oh how cool is that??!! My 6 yr old would love to have joined in with this study. Was the specs for the vane in a book? Very creative!!!

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    1. Thanks, Kay. The specs for the weather vane is in the link in the post. :-)

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  6. Wow! How cool is that??!! My 6 yr old would have loved to have joined you with this. Where did you get the specs for the meters? In a book? I need to hop over to those posts and read up.

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    1. The specs for both the hygrometer and the thermometer are contained the highlighted links in the post. Have fun! :-)

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  7. Well done Hwee! I'm quite pleased you're covering all this now. I'm hoping to do a bit of weather work with our geography unit after Easter and you will have basically written my curriculum for me! Most appreciated, thank you very much!!

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    1. You're very welcome, Claire! Glad to be of help. :-) I shall wait to see how you guys approach the topic of weather after Easter.

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  8. I haven't really covered weather with the kiddos much. At some point I should. Your wind vane worked quite well. Great job with it.

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    1. Weather wasn't on my radar until very recently. I won't worry about it too much, Ticia. You'll cover the topics that are relevant to you at any time. Perhaps weather will become relevant to you at some point. There's no hurry to cover it. :-)

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