Science Lesson- Cloud Cover

 

One thing you should know about me... I LOVE teaching science! 

 Today we learned the vocabulary words cloudy and clear.  We started by observing today's sky.  It happened to be clear.  We talked about how that would be easy to draw in our science notebooks and I drew an example on the board.  The only thing we need in our sky is the sun.  Next, I asked how would my picture change if it was cloudy?  I added clouds until the sun was covered. I asked questions to get rid of misconceptions like are clouds made of cotton balls?  smoke?  cotton candy?  No, they are made of tiny drops of water.

 Is the sun still there even though we can't see it?  Which is closer to us the clouds or the sun?  It looks like the clouds are covering the sun but it is just because we are so far away from the sun.  We modeled this idea of perspective using the lights on the ceiling and our hands.  Our hands were the clouds and the lights were the sun. 







We read the book Little Cloud by Eric Carle.  On each page we talked about cloudy vs. clear.  How clouds do not actually take or move by themselves. 




Next I told the kids they could draw a picture in their notebooks like I did but...it'd be way more fun to make a flip book!  So we did.  Here's what 2 looked like.  Each student got 1 piece of construction paper, 2 suns (copied from google images) and some scrap white paper.  They folded their paper in half to create 2 skies.  One clear and one cloudy.  The students colored the sun and labeled with markers.  The students cut out clouds from the white paper and glued them down to cover some or all of the sun.  You can't see the front but the students wrote the title, "The Sky Can Be..."

Pretty quick and painless and a whole lotta fun.  Hope you like it.  Let me know if you use it or if you have a way to change it to make it better.  I'd love to hear from you.