Science Camp Part Two: Atmosphere and Weather

 The second part of our Science Camp, using the Wonders of the Earth and Sky curriculum from Blossom and Root including the atmosphere and weather. Again, I won't share all of the activities we did, as that's proprietary information, but I'll share a few of our favorites.

Here are the books we read:

Weather Word and What They Mean, by Gail Gibbons
Clouds, by Anne Rockwell
Air is All Around You, by Franklyn M. Branley
The Kids Book of Weather Forecasting, by Mark Breen
On the Same Day in March: A Tour of the World's Weather, by Marilyn Singer
Waiting Out the Storm, by Joann Early Macken
Down Comes the Rain, by Franklyn M. Branley
Flash, Crash, Rumble, and Roll, by Franklin M. Branley
Water is Water, by Miranda Paul
Feel the Wind, by Arthur Dorros

We celebrated science camp by having a science-themed poetry teatime, using one of my favorites, the National Geographic Book of Nature Poetry.

We started off by learning about the atmosphere, and the difference between weather and climate. One of our favorite things was learning about different types of clouds, and how to predict the weather from signs in nature. Pumpkin especially has had her eyes on the sky for the past few weeks and has made some pretty good predictions about the weather. 

We also enjoyed making this cloud in a jar. This was a great experiment to see how air currents rise and fall based on temperature, as you can see in the video.

The girls also made their own weather forecast, based on their predictions using nature's signs.

We learned about various types of weather phenomena, including rain, fog, thunderstorms, and tornadoes. We had discussions about what to do in each situation to stay safe. Just yesterday, we read about tornadoes, and I assured the girls that tornadoes are extremely rare in our area, and today, I right this blog post with the knowledge that our church lost its roof to a tornado early this morning. But we felt safe knowing that we had just studied tornadoes and knew what to do to keep safe.