Showing posts with label weather. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weather. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Fun Weather Crafts for Kids

During our Weather Week of MOMS Camp we made several fun crafts!


Part of our week was all about clouds - learning the different types and reading books about them. My personal favorite is Little Cloud by Eric Carle, in which a single cloud changes into several different shapes, like a rabbit, a shark, and a clown! After reading this book we used white paint and cotton balls to paint our own cloud shapes. Naturally my daughter made hers into a lamb! We also added lots of white paint to the middle of a sheet of construction paper, then folded it in half to make a new blob shape for a cloud.  We used my favorite paint, Crayola Washable Kids Paint.



My daughter loved painting with cotton balls so much, she came up with her own project! It started when she wanted to use her favorite color (brown) to paint with... and it turned into a tornado! Later, when the paint was dry, she added lots of stickers to portray animals and bugs that might be swept up in the tornado! This project was so much fun to do!


 Another fun project was finger painting with sun block! I squirted a little bit of sun block onto a plastic lid and we used our fingers to paint with it on black construction paper. You can use any dark color of paper. Be sure the sun block is kind of thick as you're painting. Then you leave it out in the sun for a couple hours and watch how the sun fades the paper's color all around your design! The sun block will evaporate and your design will be left on the paper in the original dark color! This is a fun way to teach your kids how sun block really does protect your skin!



At the beginning of the week, we made a homemade rain gauge! This was in idea from Pinterest. You'll need an empty plastic bottle, all washed out with the label taken off.  Cut off the top part and turn it upside down, then place it inside to keep water from evaporating out later.  I used an old steak knife to cut our bottle, and covered the rough edges with duct tape. Use a ruler to mark your measurements on one side, then you can decorate your bottle with permanent markers! We left our rain gauge outside all week, with a chance of rain every day... but it barely rained at all! My daughter (age 7) still had fun going out to check it each day though. Here's a picture of the one we saw online:


Here's ours as we made it:

Windsock Craft for Kids

Our last craft we made during our Weather Week of MOMS Camp was a wind sock - and it was definitely the most popular craft of the week! We each decorated an 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of card stock for it. My daughter and I chose to paint ours, but my son (age 4) isn't always willing to sit for such long crafts so he drew on his with marker and added stickers. 


When the paint was dry, we turned them over and taped strips of crepe paper to the bottom edge. Each strip was about 18 inches. This was great cutting practice for my preschooler! Then we rolled up the card stock and stapled it together to make a cylinder. 


I used a hole puncher to add two holes across from each other at the top. Before punching the holes, I reinforced the card stock with pieces of tape on each side where the holes would go. Finally, I tied a piece of yarn through both holes (again, about 18 inches in length). 


Now we can hang them for decoration and my kids LOVED running around with their wind sock flying out behind them!

Monday, June 2, 2014

Fun Kids Recipes - Weather Theme!

Throughout our Weather Week of MOMS Camp, we made several fun recipes including snacks, side dishes, a breakfast, and desserts!

For a new take on "sunny side up eggs" we made an easy Sunshine Breakfast! This fun and simple meal of scrambled eggs and toast is from a previous post I did in 2012. You can read more about it HERE. For my son's breakfast this time, I made his with cinnamon-sugar toast!


A fun side dish we made at lunch one day was Rainbow Fruit Kabobs! This idea was one I found on Pinterest. I used different fruits than what was suggested, just because it was what I already had in my fridge plus when I went to the store for more I opted out of spending so much for blueberries! My kids don't really eat them anyway. The fruits I did use were: Strawberries; Oranges; Pineapple; Kiwi; and Blackberries. I used plastic kids' chopsticks as my sticks. My daughter loved these!




Another rainbow side dish we made was Rainbow Veggies which I served at dinner one day. This was also an idea from Pinterest. I used slices of red, orange, yellow, and green peppers for the rainbow, and cauliflower for the clouds. I also added on a "pot of gold".... ranch dressing that I dyed gold with orange food coloring! This was the first time my daughter ate ALL her peppers so this recipe will definitely hit my table again some time!


Finally, two different desserts we made this week both looked like clouds! One was Cloudy Day Jell-O. I served squares of Jell-O with puffs of whipped cream throughout to look like clouds. To get this awesome sky blue color I used COTTON CANDY flavored gelatin! It was so yummy!! I found it at Wal-Mart and had never heard of the brand Kid's Kitchen before but it was totally worth it and delicious!



A second dessert this week was my Blue Sky Float! I used vanilla ice cream in clear glasses. Meanwhile, I dyed some clear lemon-lime soda blue with food coloring. I used 5 drops to get the deep blue color I wanted. When that was poured into the glasses with vanilla ice cream it turned a little lighter and the ice cream looked like clouds! Another hit with my kids and so simple!

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Childrens Books and Movies for a Weather Theme

Summer Vacation is here and MOMS Camp 2014 has begun! MOMS Camp is something I came up with several years ago to make the most of my time with my kids during the summer. It stands for Make Our Moments Special. I've given each week over the summer a different theme.  Throughout each week we'll explore that theme with activities, crafts, movies, books, and outings. 

First off we have "Weather Week!"... complete with sunshine, clouds, rain, wind, storms, tornadoes, and ending with rainbows! We are focusing on the weather that we will be experiencing this time of year here in Kansas. This is the one time ALL SUMMER I'll be happy to see thunderstorms in the forecast! haha!


A list of books we will read this week are:

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett
Freddy The Frogcaster by Janice Dean
Clouds by Marion Dane Bauer
Little Cloud by Eric Carle
The Police Cloud by Christoph Niemann
In Like a Lion Out Like a Lamb by Marion Dane Bauer
Molly and the Storm by Christine Leeson
Stormy Weather by Debi Gliori
Extreme Weather: Tornadoes by Anne Wendorff
Over the Rainbow by Eric Puybaret
A Fairy Ballet by Daisy Meadows
Rainbow Magic: The Weather Fairies Set by  Daisy Meadows
Elmer and the Rainbow by David McKee


DVD's I've checked out from the library for this week include:

Sid the Science Kid: Weather Kid Sid
Sid the Science Kid: What is a Rainbow?
Elmos's World: The Great Outdoors (includes an episode called Weather)
Sesame Street: Elmo's Rainbow and Other Spring Stories
Dora the Explorer: Shy Rainbow
Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs (1 and 2!)
The Wizard of Oz