Fostering Weather Curiosity {with FREE Printables}

Written by Krista Smith.

My kids weren’t really interested in the weather. In fact, I don’t think they even noticed the weather for years. It could be -15 degrees outside and they would be playing (bundled to the nines, of course) as though it were springtime in the meadow. And heat? Totally impervious.

As a child, I was always fascinated by the weather. I perpetually (and ill-advisedly) sat on the porch watching thunderstorms roll through. I incessantly asked my mom to re-tell the harrowing stories of her family hunkering down for yet another hurricane. For a few years, I wanted to be a meteorologist when I grew up and I knew the movie “Twister” forward and back.

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I may or may not have recited a line from that movie to catch the interest of a boy. Something about a cloud “spiking over thirty thousand feet."

He looked impressed.

Nailed it!

But my kids didn’t care much about the weather at all except for maybe the first snow of the year. That always got their attention! So, I devised a plan to help them get a little more “weather-curious."

If you’d like to get your kids curious about the weather too, here are some homemade, simple, and easy-to-use printables to help you and your kids into the game.

Here’s what a typical day using our weather-tracker worksheets looks like in my homeschool.

Monthly Temperature Line Graph

This sheet helps us track the highs and lows of each day. We simply plot the points from the previous day's temperatures each morning and connect the dots line-graph style. We keep track of the high and low temperatures on our whiteboard in a corner that doesn’t get erased (much). Typically, I’ll ask one of the kids to look at my phone and tell me the low from the morning and again in the late afternoon for the high. The next day we plot these temperatures on our graph and erase them from the whiteboard, adding our new daily low as we go. At the end of the year, these sheets are so much fun to lay out on the floor, one next to the other in order. You can see the temperatures gradually falling from summer through winter and then coming back up again by the end of the school year! It’s also a neat way to recount that super-hot day in July or the freezing cold week in February! NEAT!

Weather Picture Tags

These tags we also place on the whiteboard in the corner next to the high and low. I laminate the tags (packaging tape works great as a simple lamination solution) and then cut a small strip of magnet and affix it to the back of each tag. Some days, because we live in the wild-wild-upper-Midwest we have two or even three weather picture tags up there to chart the following day.

Yearly Weather Type Chart

This is a fun one for people who have very distinct seasons. We live in the Dakotas and can get a lot of different weather across the seasons. Lots of sun, some fabulous thunderstorms, blinding blizzards and wind.

All in the same day. 

(Kidding. Mostly.)

So every morning, we refer to the weather picture tags from the day before. Was it sunny and windy yesterday? Was it mostly sunny with a freak thunderstorm in the afternoon? We then color the boxes using the key at the top of the page. When we have a day with completely random weather, we cut the box in half diagonally or in thirds (if it was a super-freaky day) and color each fraction of the box accordingly.

Weather Type Frequency Chart

This is a good one to find out what your sunniest or cloudiest month of the year is! Just how many windy days did we have this year? 365? Really!? That many.

Shock of the century.
(Did I mention it’s windy here?)

At the end of every month, we look at our colored boxes and add them up. Halves added to halves and so on until you get a number to write into your month’s corresponding box. 

A Bonus "Weather" Activity  

I wanted to share one other thing we do from time to time: “Weather-back-rubs." One child sits in front of me and I ask them to tell me what kind of weather they want. If my son says, “Windy," I say, “Okay, hard or soft wind?” And then I correspondingly rub my hands across his back in a windy (totally personal preference on what this looks like) motion. Then I ask two more times. Our son’s favorite is hard rain (I take my fingertips and tap tap tap him on the back as hard as he likes). Our daughter’s is soft wind. You can make up your own weather phenomena for this. Once each child has had a chance to have three or four different back rubs you can rest assured they’ll be relaxed and ready to start the rest of the morning! But not before someone gives mommy some booming thunder on the back (cupped palms banging away) and a little bit of gentle rain please-and-thank you. 

A Final Word  

I hope and pray that these are helpful to you as you stir up the weather-lover in your children. But more than that, I hope that it brings up great conversations with them about how amazing, creative, and ingenious our God is. Without the wind, we couldn’t have pollination. Without the sun, the plants would cease to grow. The snow helps water the ground and provides an abundance of fresh runoff water through the spring and summer months. Truly, He has it all figured out! Point your kids that direction and watch the wonder grow.

"When He imparted weight to the wind and meted out the waters by measure, When He set a limit for the rain And a course for the thunderbolt, Then He saw it and declared it; He established it and also searched it out.                                                                                  ~Job 28:25-27

To download your own 

Weather Unit Printables

*These printables are FREE but are for personal use only. In downloading the following files, you are agreeing not to copy, reproduce, or alter them except for your own personal, non-commercial usage. In addition, you are also agreeing not to share or publicly display any or all parts of the materials on Facebook, in an email, or in person. If you wish to share the downloads with others, please share a direct LINK to this post.

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Krista Smith is blessed to be the mother of three beautiful children and is privileged to homeschool them using an eclectic variety of methods. She has a deep and abiding love for tan-colored coffee, spending time with her family, and seeing children find their forever homes through adoption. But above all of these things, Krista is, first and foremost, a lover and follower of Jesus Christ. So, may the Lord and His Gospel get every ounce of honor, glory, and credit for anything she writes, says, or does.