St Raphael’s Growing Outside

Thursday12th October2017

Weather:

Children:

Year 4

Weather!

Today in Growing outside we thought it would be great to try and measure the Weather! But how can you measure weather? We had a think about all the different types of weather you can have – rain, wind, snow, hail and sun! (plus a few more exciting things like lightning and hurricanes!)

Without expensive equipment, there are still a few ways we can make our own things to measure some of the weather. The children split into groups and I gave them a challenge to make a rain gauge – an empty 2 litre bottle, a ruler, a sharpie pen and some scissors. A rain gauge is something that collects the rain that falls.

The children realised they needed to cut off the top where the bottle is at it’s widest. Then they needed to measure centimetres from the bottom upwards and mark them on the bottle with the sharpie pen.

Next we made a Weather Vane – something that tells up which direction the wind is blowing from and to. This time I gave the children a straw, a pin, a pencil with a rubber on top and an empty milk bottle to make arrows from.

We pushed the pin through the middle of the straw while it was horizontal and into the rubber on the top of the pencil. This meant the straw could spin around. But it needed something bigger on the ends to catch the wind, so we made arrows for the front and back from the milk bottle and taped them on. Brilliant!

We also had a thermometer to measure the temperature. Now we had all our instruments to measure the weather, we thought about WHERE to measure it. First we stood on the playground. We could tell using our weather vanes which way the wind was blowing, but how could we tell which direction that was?

Well, if the sun’s out you could get a rough idea which is South from where the sun is shining at midday. Otherwise you can use a Compass. The children learnt how to use the compass, holding it flat and matching the red arrow which always points North with the N point on the compass which will then tell us where South, East and West are too!

We learnt how to use a thermometer, noting there are two measurements for temperature. Some children started recording their findings on a chart. This was a great idea as they can now update this every day and compare how the weather changes!

Then we went up onto the top field to see if the measurements were any different and found the wind was blowing a lot harder. Why was that? We positioned the rain gauges in different places to see if they all collected the same amount, and finally back in the classroom we looked at the Forecast by the BBC. We had made our own Predictions when we were up on the hill about the weather – did we get them right?

Phew! The weather is fascinating and the week ahead should be fascinating to measure too! Well done year 4 – you are now weather men and women!

Mandy