clouds Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

Blowing Cloud like puffs with a straw from one cloud to another is a wonderful sensory activity and a science exploration. Your children will experiment with how strongly they need to blow each puff to get it to get to the paper cloud.

Let me walk you through this sensory activity and share with you how to turn into a science exploration.

Sensory Activity

Getting Ready

Materials:

Variety of types of straws
Cotton Balls
Pom-Poms
Tissues Wadded into a Ball
Styrofoam balls or peanuts
White and blue construction paper
scissors
tape

You need to tape some paper clouds that have been glued to blue paper across a table or floor. The tape will hold the clouds in place.

Then place a collection of straws into a cup for your children to use. Each child will need their own set of straws to avoid sharing germs.

Next, gather to gather clouds like objects and place then into a bowl.

Blowing the Clouds Activity

Children will select a paper cloud to place their first cloud object on. They will then blow the object off that could and to the next cloud.

When they have made the cloud object travel to each of the clouds. They can select a different object to blow or a different type of straw to blow with.

Science Exploration

Before your children start blowing their cloud objects you can ask them to predict which object will be the easiest to blow. After blowing each of the objects from cloud to could. You can see if the prediction was right.

You can also have them predict which straw will be the easiest to blow with. Then they can try each of the straws to see which one is the easiest. After testing all the straws, you can ask them if the result proved their prediction to be correct.

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This activity would be wonderful to explore after reading the book Little Cloud by Eric Carle. Here are some more wonderful activities based on the book:

Here are some more wonderful books about clouds:

Do you remember staring up at the clouds to look for cloud pictures or shapes? I used to take my students out to look at clouds. Then we would go back into the classroom and write stories about what we had seen. We recently painted a cardboard tube blue with white fluffy clouds to create a sky viewing tool and did several activities with it.

Do you need to have sky tool to view cloud? No, but it helped us narrow our focus onto a small section of the sky at a time.

How to Make a Cloud Pictures in the Sky Tool

It is so easy to make your Do You See Pictures in the Sky tool. You simply take a cardboard tube and paint sky blue. White fluffy clouds are then painted onto the tube to illustrate what the tool is used for. Your children could select any color of blue to make theirs and any gray or white for the clouds. They could use cotton balls as we did to make the clouds. Sponges or foam brushes would be great to paint clouds with too.

What to do While Looking at Cloud Pictures

You can have your children point the cloud viewer towards the clouds in the sky and share what cloud pictures they see. They can be encouraged to use descriptive words to share their size, shape, color, and texture. Kids can use action words to share what the cloud picture is doing. If your children love learning big words, you can tell them that they are using adjectives to describe their pictures and verbs to tell about their actions.
Children can work together to find cloud pictures and build a story about what is happening with their cloud objects in the sky. Not all the stories need to take place in the sky. You can encourage your kids to use the cloud pictures as inspiration and let their stories take place anywhere.
Cloud picture viewing can be done lying on the ground and looking straight up, sitting in a chair, or standing. We have viewed clouds in each of these ways.
You can have your children take crayons and drawing paper to record their favorite cloud pictures. We have found adding facial characteristics or additional details to the cloud picture, later on, is a lot of fun.
Writing down a story based your cloud pictures is fun too. Children can create a cloud story journal that they can bring along with their cloud viewer to parks, on car trips, or use in their backyard.

Wonderful Cloud-Themed Books

Here are some wonderful books about clouds and clouds pictures I think you will enjoy. They would be fun to read just before having your first cloud picture viewing session.

Shapes in the Sky: A Book About Clouds (Amazing Science: Weather)

Little Cloud board book

Clouds (Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out Science 1)

It Looked Like Spilt Milk

I am participating in a fun series this week with awesomely talented bloggers called Craft Closet Boredom Busters. Each day I will be sharing a fun activity you can do with your children along with links to the other bloggers’ ideas!