What's the Weather?

Lately, the kids have been asking a lot of questions about the weather (the biggest being: How does the weatherman know what the weather is going to be?), so I decided to do a unit on weather.  I pulled out all my science experiment books and my folder of weather of activities and checked-out a few books from the library and started learning with the kids. 

We started by making a graph of the daily temperature.  Unfortunately the weather didn't change much and our graph stayed right around the 75 degree mark.  We also made our own thermometer.  The idea behind it is that as the water in the bowl and the bottle get hotter it expands and goes up the straw.  The card taped to the straw has a "ruler" to measure how high the water gets. 

We also made a barometer.  I'm not sure how accurate it was, though, but it was fun to watch it go from high pressure to low pressure and back.

We also made some tools to test the direction of the wind and the strength of the wind.  Too bad that I didn't get a picture of the other one--it was pretty neat looking.  It would spin around and you were supposed to count how many times it went around in a certain amount of time.  We were lucky to have one windy day and got to see it work. 

Then we talked about clouds and made little cloud cards to try and learn the different types and what type of weather they will bring.  There are a lot of different types and we didn't do too well at remembering them, but at least we can refer to the cards if needed. 

We also learned how rain is made and tried to make it rain inside.  We got a few drops.

And we talked about how a meteorologist "guesses" what the weather will be and how important it is for him to know what the weather is all over the country.  He uses his knowledge about cold fronts and warm fronts and high pressure and low pressure systems to predict the weather.

We enjoyed doing the experiments and learned a little more about weather, but I don't think any of the kids wants to be a meteorologist when they grow up.