This project ran from Monday 23rd of May until Sunday 29th of May.
The project was prompted by a weather workshop at the local country park, and it was our second weather project for Solomon as we had explored the topic in his first year of home education (see Project 45: The Weather). At the workshop the children made a kite, an anemometer, and an octogrid for looking at cloud cover.
They also made another anemometer at home, using the instructions from the Weather Watcher book, although it didn't work very well.
Using a number of books from the library, as well as online resources, we explored types of weather, where weather comes from, and the different layers of the atmosphere, as well as climate change and greenhouse gases.
This week's project was selected to coincide with a home education group on micro-climates at Ferry Meadows, the local country park (the second home ed group we've been to there this year - see Project 68: Birds of the World). We've covered Project 45:The Weather previously, although this one looked more closely at differences in climate and the impact of climate change.
The Ferry Meadows workshop was designed to show how different micro-climates can exist in a small geographic area. The children had to measure windspeed, light intensity, air temperate, ground temperature, and canopy cover at 20 metre intervals.
Measuring micro-climates at Ferry Meadows
We also explored the differences between our own area and a Scottish island, using resources on the Royal Geographical Society web site.
Finally we explored the issue of climate change, global warming, and the greenhouse effect with videos from BBC Teach:
Finally, they also made their own climate change posters:
As the heatwave continues we decided to look a bit more closely at the topic of the weather this week. As we don't particularly watch live TV we had to start by watching a weather forecast, before going on to look at the water cycle, the climate, and climate change.
The nice thing about the weather is there are also plenty of little experiments that you can do.We had bought a simple weather station in Maplin's closing down sale earlier in the year and took measurements throughout the week, and plan to do so on a weekly basis over the year to see how the weather changes.
Weather Station
It's a cheap weather station (currently £10.73 on Amazon) and you get what you pay for. The plant on the box is a bit misleading, as neither it nor the pictured bottle are part of the kit, and the wind speed meter is purely to help you gauge whether the wind is calm, light, breezy or strong, rather than a proper anemometer. Nonetheless, it's good enough for a 5 yr old learning a bit more about the weather.
To accompany the video on the water cycle from the Met Office, we also did the "It's raining inside" experiment from Science Projects: Weather. It's a simple experiment with some very hot water in a jug and a bag of ice resting on top. As the water vapour hits the bag it condenses and 'rains' back down.
Making rain inside
Science Projects: Weather has just ten experiments in total, and if I had a criticism it would be that it is a bit wordy, but if your kids are a bit older the additional information and suggested further reading would probably be useful.
We used the cloud spotting guide from the Met office to spot different types of cloud when we were out and about; although it's actually quite difficult for the novice spotter to distinguish between a cirrocumulus and an altocumulus, and I'm not convinced we always got it right!
The weather also provides plenty of craft opportunities. Solomon created a picture of his favourite type of weather, and Monica created a weather dial to keep track of the day's weather.
