With spring comes unsettled weather: sun, clouds, wind, rain and rainbows. If you’re looking for activities to engage your child, read on for a number of weather-themed ideas.
As spring brings warmer weather, it’s the perfect time for you and your child to get outside. Turn a walk through your neighbourhood or to a nearby park into a scavenger hunt. As any child will tell you, no true scavenger hunt is complete without binoculars!
Source: Buggy Buddy
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Now that your binoculars are ready, it’s time to go exploring! Perhaps you and your child have looked for interesting shapes and compared them to familiar objects, but did you know that different types of clouds help tell the weather?
Rainy days are a good time to learn about, well, rain. Has your child ever wondered where rain comes from? Look to Down Comes the Rain by Franklyn Branley. Ideal for children in Grades 2 to 4, it’s an informative look at the water cycle. It explains how water is recycled, how clouds are formed, and why rain and hail occur. The book also includes a number of easy science activities.
Here’s one you can try, using items you already have.
Source: One Sharp Bunch
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Rain is also sensory: it engages our sense of sight and touch, as well as our sense of smell and hearing.
Have you ever wondered about the smell of rain? Has your child ever asked you about it? There’s actually a name for it: petrichor (pronounced PEH-trih-core). This smell, which can be sweet or earthy, is produced when rain falls on dry soil. Certain plants absorb the rain and give off an oil during dry periods. Clay-based soils and rocks absorb this oil. Then, when it rains again, the oil is released into the air, along with bacteria from wet soil. This is what you smell when it rains.
Rain also produces sound, something you and your child can reproduce using common materials.
Source: Powerful Mothering
After the rain come rainbows—and another opportunity for a sensory activity with your child.
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If you have an older child fascinated by the rain jar activity and rainbows, you’ll love this next activity.
Source: Playdough Potato
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When pouring liquids into the jar, be sure to avoid having it touch the sides.
If you have an older child, explain how raindrops act like small prisms to break sunlight into various colours. This video (YouTube; 2:44) can help you explain how a prism works to make rainbow colours. This short clip also includes a simple box experiment to create a rainbow at home.
If you’re looking for even more weather-themed activities to engage your child on a rainy—or even a sunny—day, consider these resources:
Rainbow science activities for kids
From all of us at Lift Legal, happy spring!
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