Our Routine: Weather Week Lesson Plan!

Whether or not you like it, it's Weather Week!

Building a lesson Plan for beginners!

In all honesty I did not know where I should start when I first started making lesson plans but in all honesty it is really so easy. When you teach your child to make their bed in the morning. That is teaching!

I recently decided to home school my children, so as a new home school mommy I am pretty nervous. It is one thing to teach a class, it is another thing to teach your own children!

They may not listen, pay attention, act out, drive you crazy. But one thing I learned that is effective: ROUTINE, ROUTINE, ROUTINE!

Make sure that what you do daily is routine! This teaches your children what to expect next. We were always pretty into routine as far as naps every day and a bedtime, however, as I started testing the waters with home schooling, I decided to follow an even stricter routine. AND IT WORKS! I'll give you my little secret.

When we wake up we do our daily chores and self-care routine. We "make our bed," I put that in quotations because they make their bed very interestingly, but hey! It's made! We brush our teeth, put some clothes, brush our hair and go down stairs for some breakfast.

This teaches them basic self care skills. Allowing them to do things on their own teaches them independence in this aspect!

Before we start learning time, when they are done with breakfast we clean up the table and start table activities. We used magnets, and kinetic sand in this example!

Kinetic sand is a great fine motor activity!

These magnetic shapes are probably the best thing created. I say this because I really enjoy playing with them! However, this activity promotes problem solving and creative building. I allow them to do table activities for about 15 to 20 minutes. Afterwards we do our "Circle time." We sing our songs, count, recite our ABC's, and go over our colors. EVERYDAY! Repetition is key, especially with those non-talking toddlers! Another thing we do during circle time is our Calendar. The calendar we use is from amazon, and it is magnetic. This is where we do the days of the week, months of the year, weather and seasons!

Kid's love to be hands on! LET THEM! Even if you are a bit OCD like me, that is fine, most if not all kids are hands on learners. This calendar was especially perfect for our lesson this week. But before that, I usually have Legacy practice writing and spelling her name, telling me her birthday, and doing other activities that help her with writing and literacy.

I literally made this out of what I had at home! Teaching does not have to be expensive. I used some letters I bought from the dollar store forever ago, traced it onto paper, and had her scavenge through a pile of letters and match them up. Great for letter recognition, and if you have to hurry up and finish prepping an activity you never got around to, you can, because it can be time consuming. That is me, I can be a procrastinator. Any way back to the lesson!

WEATHER

I usually start it off by explaining to them the lesson for the week. "We are learning about weather this week! What do you think weather is?"

Asking them open ended questions really encourages them to use their mind, and really sparks their curiosity. Plus it is a great conversation starter! This is also where I will read a book that pertains to the lesson theme. Reading a book always keeps my children engaged and entertained! Then I printed out "weather words" for our word board, laminated them and then smacked some velcro on it so it can stick on my flannel board. ( Early childhood DIY blog hopefully in future).

Having the pictures next to the words connects the word with the picture. Encourages them with reading the word itself. Here we discussed each word and what it meant. I allowed her to answer what each is, in which case she got all of it right. Could I be raising a genius? Anyway, this is also a literacy activity as well as a hint of science depending on how you discuss each word. I talked about how rain is created, how snow is created, etc. Incorporating different subjects is easy!

With my youngest, who is only two, I did a simple activity with her. I gave her the picture of the sun, and a picture of the cloud.

I asked her "show me the cloud" or "show me the sun" she would hold up which one is which. This encouraged her to participate. I do not obligate her to sit through the lessons, as we all know it can be very hard for a toddler to do that, but when she does I encourage her to participate. Something as simple as this will be easy and effective. But for the most part she wants to be included. Anybody who knows her can tell you that she is not much of a participant, so asking her questions, giving her opportunities like this is good for them.

Moving on. We do have some math activities we did. Math is a hard one to teach, however, this subject is so much easier to teach hands on. Here is a few math activities we did this week.

This was a super easy activity. We created little suns, bolts, raindrops out of foam boards we had lying around and used cotton balls for the snow. My sister was creative and used blue beads for the drops, yellow buttons for the sun, and crystals for the snow, if you have things like that laying around by all means! Careful if you have younger children, of course. The numbers will tell your child how much of each she would need and so on. Hopefully I can link my teacherspayteachers account on this blog in the future so you can get a hold of these bad boys. Also another activity you can do with them that is a math activity is, weather stew.

We used the same things we made for the other activity, however, added the rainbows made with pipe cleaners. This is the same concept, the card tells you exactly how much you would need of each and you just "throw it in your stew." (Metaphorically speaking)

This next activity I did with both my girls. A mixture of small motor skills and math.

These pebbles you can get at the dollar store! These are our rain drops, we talked about how a cloud is filled with rain droplets. So they practiced putting "raindrops" on their cloud using a grabbing utensil. With my oldest, I had her count as she grabbed. Also may I add, look how cute my child looked with her hand on her chin! KODAK MOMENT! (Cue "Aww")

Anywho, this is another math activity, but also practices exercising those fine motor muscles. Another math activity you can do is similar to the last one.

I would ask Legacy to give me three raindrops and she would count them and put them on the cloud. Like the other activities it encouraged counting. Then I would ask her to take away one raindrop, and tell me how much she has left. She says "two." And just like that you introduced subtraction! It really does not have to be hard. Like mentioned previously math is better hands-on.

ART: I have multiple weather ideas that you can do. Pinterest will become your best friend! I made rainbow clouds with cotton and streamers. You can make wind chimes out of a cup and stringed beads hanging from it. Or in this case we created one with raindrops that spelled our name.

Usually before art we have lunch and take our nap. Then we would do our art after we had snack. We learned that rain clouds are grey, so she chose to color her cloud grey! She is learning something, yay! I must be doing something right lol.  We would then do our work sheets, and/or workbook after art! One of the worksheets was a week long assignment. No I did not make her do a long assignment, before you ask. We were "meteorologist" and every day of the week we recorded the weather for that day on our worksheet. At the end of the worksheet it asks her "prediction" for the weekend.

She was very excited to have completed this worksheet, run over to teacherspayteachers and look a weather worksheet up I am sure you would find one, if you are interested. She loved being a meteorologist, and looking out the window to see the weather. This was a science activity! We also went for a walk around the neighborhood, and discussed the weather outside. "Is it cold? rainy? do you feel the wind?" etc. This not only works the mind with asking her questions but it is great for gross motor! Another great gross motor activity is making sounds with your body that would represent different weather sounds. Snap your fingers, its drizzling. Pat your thighs, its raining. Pat and stomp your feet its pouring. Stand up stomp around and clap your hands, its thunder storming etc. This one makes for great laughs too, so be prepared! Another topic you can converse with your little, regarding the weather topic, is how does certain weather types make you feel. There goes that open ended question again, for example "cloudy rainy days make me feel sad because I can't play outside." I would ask her, "Well what could you do to make it fun to be inside?" This is a great social-emotional activity that can encourage her to manage her emotions.

I believe that this blog literally covered most, if not all the subjects needed for a full lesson, with the theme being weather. This blog may seem long, but I assure you our learning did not feel long. She enjoys learning. We need to teach our children to love to learn! It all starts at home! Let me know if you tried any of this! I'd love to hear from you!

-Lily