Calendar Time Weather

We discuss 4 components of the weather every day during calendar time. I have two students who are responsible for giving a report on the temperature, cloud cover, precipitation and wind speed for the week. Since my classroom is right next to the outside door, these two students us a small silver pom pom to hold up in the wind to determine if the wind is calm, breezy or gusty. They simply observe the sky to see if the sky is clear, partly cloudy or overcast. Then we are fortunate to have a thermometer inside our classroom that shows both the inside and outside temperatures which they can easily read. The students make their report, and we record the information on the graphs pictured above. I've merged some store bought things with some things of my own design...pretty simple but gets the job done. We keep track of each day's temperature using a color coded system for hot, warm, cool and cold and transfer the information to a year-long graph sorted by month so that we can study the color trends and identify weather patterns through the seasons. We also use this weather time to practice counting on the thermometer by 5's and 2's and to discuss "greater than" and "less than" with relevance to actual temperatures. The graph pictured only shows August, but our graph now has red (hot), orange (warm) and green(cool) temperatures recorded showing how the weather temperature is getting cooler as we move into Fall. (Not that cool though...We do live in Texas and it's only almost Halloween. ;)