Do your students ever wonder why the sky is blue or where rain comes from? Maybe they’re curious about how to read a thermometer or eager to predict the weather for their next outdoor adventure. If so, you’re in the right place! 🌦️ From hands-on experiments to creative crafts, these activities make learning about weather engaging, interactive, and fun. Check out these 17 weather activities for the primary classroom—and don’t miss #14, a total student favorite!
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1. Solar Oven S’mores
Marshmallows. Chocolate. Graham crackers. Usually, these would accompany a bonfire, but not when you’re learning about the weather! I can’t think of a more delicious and engaging way to explore the power of the sun than by building a solar oven and cooking up a delicious s’more.
2. Be a Meteorologist
I’m sure that you go over the weather during your calendar time each day. Do you have a designated Meteorologist? We have a quick no prep way that they can deliver the weather each day to your class. Or, take your entire class outside with papers and clipboards and have them observe the weather.
3. Make Your Own Thermometer
With just a few simple ingredients, you can make your own thermometer. While this thermometer won’t tell you exact temperatures, it will tell you relative temperatures and kids have a blast making and checking the temperature. Add an actual thermometer reading activity to help your students read number lines.
4. Make a Rainbow
Rainbows are super trendy, colorful, and a fascinating science concept. There are loads of ways you can make your own rainbow, but one of the coolest is to explore how to make a rainbow bubble snake.
5. Make Your Own Rain Gauge
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, it was never a question of IF it was going to rain, but HOW MUCH it would rain. Making your own rain gauge is super simple using a ruler, marker, and a recycled plastic bottle.
6. STEM Challenge – Build a Shelter
This is a fun activity that challenges your students to build a shelter that will protect an ice cube from the sun and keep it from melting. Let your students’ creativity run wild with this activity where the sky is the limit for materials to build their shelter. Then, after they have their plan sketched and detailed, have them gather the materials and put their plan into action. See whose structure protects the ice best and keeps the cube in the solid-state longest!
7. Water Cycle in Action DIY
Use a plastic sandwich bag with blue-tinted water to build a miniature model of the water cycle. By placing the project in a sunny place, kids will easily see evidence of the water cycle happening before their very eyes.
8. Weather Observations Book
Perfect to use every morning or after lunch during your weather unit. Each student has a booklet where they record the type of weather, temperature, and any other notes they want to make about what they see and feel outside that day.
9. Cloud Watching
Read a book about clouds and then take your class outside – preferably on a late spring or early fall day when the chances of those big, beautiful cumulus clouds are greater. Have them pick a comfy spot, lay down, and just watch the clouds. Let them talk about what they see up there.
The extensions to this activity are endless – writing, creating a class book, art projects, cloud identification, etc.
10. Sunscreen Painting
In this simple and engaging experiment, students use sunscreen to “paint” a picture on paper and place it outside on a sunny day. As the sun shines, the uncovered areas of the paper begin to fade while the sunscreen-covered design stays bright, clearly showing how sunscreen blocks harmful UV rays. This hands-on activity makes an abstract concept easy to see and helps students understand why protecting their skin from the sun is so important.
11. Make it Rain!!!
Here’s a fun experiment to show what happens when the clouds gather too many water droplets!
12. Make a Weather Vane
Another way for students to “see” wind is to create a weather vane. Using simple easy-to-find materials ( straw, pencil, clay, notecard, and pin), your students can create their own tool to measure the wind. To see if they will work take them outside on a windy day and place on different parts of the playground. Your students can observe if any of the weather vanes move.
13. Make a Cloud in a Jar
By far one of my favorite experiments (and my students’ too!) Cloud formation might seem like magic in this activity, but the process becomes blatantly real and obvious after you talk about what is actually happening. There’s nothing and then suddenly a cloud appears!
14. Weather Movement Breaks – FREEBIE
Kids… Need… To… Move! Let me say it again, just in case you’ve forgotten – kids need to move! Grab this dice activity and get rolling whenever you’re in need of a brain/movement break and reap the benefits of happy students. (They’ll love twirling like a tornado or melting like an icicle).
15. Sing About the Weather
One of those tips for learning tricky material is to make up silly songs and acronyms. Well, not only will singing about the weather help your students remember the concepts, it is FUN! If you’re like me, you wouldn’t be caught dead singing in front of other adults, but singing with kids? Heck, yes!
Make up your own songs or check out some we’ve found for you! Toss one of these songs in your morning meeting or sing it during class, but remember, some kids will need repeated exposure to the song before they’re ready to start singing with you.
16. Read a Weather Book
Our done-for-you weather book list makes planning a breeze by gathering engaging read-alouds and mentor texts for any type of weather your students are learning about. Whether you’re exploring sunny days, stormy skies, or snowy forecasts, these carefully selected books help build background knowledge, spark discussion, and connect literacy to science—all without the extra prep time for you.
17. Weather Cause & Effect
This cut-and-glue cause-and-effect activity helps students make meaningful connections using real-world weather scenarios. As students sort and match weather events with their outcomes—like rain leading to needing an umbrella or winds allowing you to fly a kite—they strengthen their understanding of how the weather impacts our actions.
These have all been a hit in my classroom. Be sure to try out some of these ideas in your next weather unit!
Written by: Kristin Halverson
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