Weather Center....in progress

The Geography Center is a hit. Both boys like having their books laid out on Monday morning in front of it along with the map they will be using for the week. As the weeks go on I think we will be able to incorporate it more and more.

So now I have set my focus to the Weather Center. This is a little trickier. If I put it on a folding display board it will be hard for the boys to write on their charts. So now I am thinking that the actual record keeping will just have to be either hung up on the wall or put in a folder. We will still be making a Weather Center outside.

I picked up My Calendar Book at our homeschool conventionhttp://www.rainbowresource.com/proddtl.php?sid=1185407857-278591&id=021786 and I plan to use this daily with each of the boys. So far workbook pages have been a hit (just added few this year for logic and such) so I think they will enjoy filling out the calendar pages. This will especially benefit my 4yr old to help him learn the months of the year and dates.

Today we made our rain gauges and a chart to record the types of clouds in the sky each day. Tomorrow we are going to be making an anemometer to measure how fast the wind blows. I found the instructions for this in Janice VanCleave's Weather Mind Boggling Experiments You Can Turn into Science Fair Projects. I also found a book called Make Your Own Weather Station by Melvin Berger used at Half Price Books. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0590438778/ref=olp_product_details/102-6196855-4792155?ie=UTF8&seller=Inside there are instructions on how to make a shelter for your instruments and instructions on making a variety of instruments. My copy is used so most of the punchout pages are gone but the instructions are still good. However one with all of the pieces would be even better :) . At our library book sale I found a Discovery Reader How's the Weather? also by Melvin and Gilda Berger. This is a simple book with alot of information. I think this will be great for Turtle Toes.

The goal is for our Weather Center to be something we get up and running and then work on for only 5 min. or so each day. The boys will record temps, clouds, etc and then we will move on to the next subject. I guess that follows the Charlotte Mason philosophy. :)

A funny from Turtle Toes today. We had just read about the different types of clouds so I had both boys go and look out the window to see what clouds they say. Turtle Toes says in all seriousness "I see a tiger cloud". I'm not sure how to graph that but apparently we need to add a category of clouds ....those that look like something else. Then we were putting our rain gauges out and I mentioned that all we needed to do now was to wait for it to rain so we could measure the amount in our gauges. Turtle Toes pipes in and says "why don't we get a bucket of water and pour it in then we can measure it." Turkey Lips and I got a good laugh out of that today.