Weather School / First Weather · ages 2 to 5
Rainy Days
What does a raindrop do when it lands?
The mission: guess first, then go look
Guess what a raindrop does when it hits a puddle: disappear, bounce, or draw a ring.
Watch the rain land in a puddle and see for yourself. Every drop signs its name the same way.
When the tiny drops in a cloud bump together, they make bigger drops.
Big drops are too heavy for the air to hold, so down they come.
The rain lands in puddles, and puddles are for boots.
Professor Weather Rock says
Raindrops are not shaped like teardrops. Small ones are round, and big ones flatten out like tiny hamburger buns.
Rocktivity Time!
Pick a door. Every door is a good one.
Move like the weather
Rain with your fingers. Tap them softly on the floor for drizzle, faster for rain, then drum your whole hands for a downpour. Now slow back down to single drips. Storms end the same way.
Ask them
“Where do you think all this water came from?”
The Rocktivity
Put an empty cup outside in the rain. Look at it after. That cup is a rain gauge, and now you own one.
When it rains, try this
Put a towel and a spatula out in the rain, side by side. Guess first: which one will be soaked, and which one will shrug the rain right off? Check after a few minutes. Then set a pot out and listen. Rain plays every pot a little differently.
Is the rock right?
You looked with your own eyes. The rock is outside looking too. Ask it what it sees, then decide together who read the sky better.
Words we learned
For the grown-up
That cup is the first instrument. Later the same child builds a real gauge and grades our forecast with it; this is where that starts.
Rocktivity
Take it off the screen
A colouring sheet with the big word to trace, plus the whole lesson in print. Free for any home or classroom.
The trail continues
If the sky ever rumbles while it rains, stop and count slowly until the boom. Small numbers mean the storm is close. Big numbers mean it is far away.
Counting the Thunder turns your counting into a measuring tape.