Weather

Books

🌿🌻The Seasons by Anna Milbourne (illustrated by Yaara Cellier)
With cute illustrations and easy text, this book describes the changes in weather, plants, and animals through the shifting seasons. Muddy spring thaws greet emerging hibernators and early flowers, warming weather welcomes baby animals, and summer sun shines on bees and berries. Fall arrives misty and cool as leaves fall and evenings grow darker, giving way to cold and snowy winters that thaw once more into spring.

🌿🌻Nerdy Babies: Weather by Emmy Katsner
With simple illustrations and easy text, Kastner explores aspects of weather that we can see and feel and provides simple scientific explanations for rain, snow, wind, and rainbows. Readers are introduced to the tools that meteorologists use to detect and measure the weather because scientists, like babies, are always curious!

🌿🌻Little Raindrop by Melanie Joyce (illustrated by Gina Maldonado)
This cute, illustrated board book tells the story of a raindrop’s life cycle from sky to ground to plants and back again, describing the water cycle in a first-person narrative with rhythm and rhyme. Sound and simple science explanations balance out everything having faces.

🌿🌻Little Snowflake by Suzanne Fossey (illustrated by Gina Maldonado)
This illustrated board book describes the “life cycle” of a snowflake, describing the frostier side of the water cycle through a first-person narrative. Sound and simple science explanations balance out everything having faces.

🌿🌻Celebration of the Seasons: Goodnight Songs by Margaret Wise Brown
This book is a collection of seasonal songs written by Margaret Wise Brown. They can be read as poems or you can listen to the songs produced by Tom Proutt and Emily Gary and learn to sing them along with the book at naptime. It’s also available as a board book!

🌿🌻Fairy Friends: Seasons by Merrilee Liddiard
The illustrations of this board book use leaves and flowers in mixed media to depict fairies representing the seasons. The high-contrast imagery is mesmerizing for infants who are just starting to perceive their world in new depths!

🌿🌻Play in Any Weather by Lizzy Doyle
This Indestructibles book for babies features simple text and high-contrast illustrations of outdoor play throughout the year.

🌿Sunshine & Snowballs by Margaret Wise Brown (illustrated by Charlotte Cooke)
This charming book explores the weather through the different seasons of the year. Brown’s feel for rhythm and rhyme make this book a natural for read-aloud.

🌿Raindrops Roll by April Pulley Sayre
This book balances beautiful photo-illustrations of rainy weather with simple poetic verses describing rainfall in nature.  Additional information about the science of rain is found at the end of the book.

🌿Feel the Fog by April Pulley Sayre
With ethereal photo illustrations and sparse text executed with excellent rhyme and rhythm, Sayre shows us a foggy natural world thick with cool and misty air where wildlife is sighted through dim lighting and gray haze. Restrained verses describe where and how fog forms, and an appendix provides greater detail.

🌿Best in Snow by April Pulley Sayre
With bold photo illustrations punctuated by simple verses (at 2-6 words per page), this book describes the characteristics of snow as it falls, accumulates, melts, and refreezes. It showcases many North American animals in high contrast amidst the snow. An appendix shares more detailed facts about the formation (and forms) of snow.

🌿A Place for Rain by Michelle Schaub (illustrated by Blanca Gomez)
Rain falls in a city and runoff from the woods carries pollution from the streets into local waterways, but it could instead be diverted through planned “rain gardens,” reducing runoff to waterways and filtering water through the deep root systems of native wildflowers and grasses.

🌿Thank You, Rain by Dan McCauley (illustrated by Jo Loring-Fisher)
Soft-edged illustrations depict a rained-in BIPOC family that goes out in the wet weather to walk and dance in the rain. Under their father’s guidance, the children discover an appreciation for the rain with full senses, including touch, sight, and sound.

🌿 A Rainbow of My Own by Don Freeman
In this story, a child runs out to chase a rainbow, only to find it’s disappeared! They imagine instead how they might befriend and play with rainbow if it were to stay. When the sun comes out to end their daydream, they return indoors to find a rainbow they can keep!

🌿Toad Weather by Sandra Markle (illustrated by Thomas Gonzalez)
Based on a true story, this photo-illustrated book tells the story of a mother and daughter going out on a wet and rainy day and exploring a natural phenomenon in the rain where a local road is closed each year to protect toads crossing the road in the rain.

🌿Let’s Go Puddling by Emma Perry (illustrated by Claire Alexander)
Children get dressed and go out to play in the rain, stomping in puddles and getting soaked before coming home and changing into cozy dry clothes again for snuggles.

🌿Worm Weather by Jean Taft (illustrated by Matt Hunt)
Children adventure in rainy weather with their rainy day gear as worms come up from the ground with the rain. The children run indoors to eat when thunder and lightning crash. Simple words with good rhythm and rhyme.

🌿Chasing Rainbows by Gabby Grant
A child father encourages her to go for a rainy walk with him and look for a trail of “clues” left behind by a rainbow. They find colors “left behind” by the rainbow in leaves, store items, hair, clothes, apartment windows, and graffiti.

On a Rainy Day by Sarah Luann Perkins
This story describes the experience of a father and daughter caught out in the rain who hurry home to shelter from a storm until it passes before taking advantage of the opportunity to go back outdoors for puddle splashing. This story has fairly few words but lots of different onomatopoeia throughout the illustrations.

🌿Deborah Kerbel – Cute puffy-covered books feature lovely collage illustrations of outdoor activities in all kinds of weather, plus great rhythm and rhyme in the texts. Titles include Rainy Days, Sunny Days, Windy Days, and Snowy Days. Each book corresponds to one season, as well.

Sara Neeson – Poetic descriptions of the wonderful things about each type of weather.  Titles include I like the Sun, I Like the Rain, I like the Snow, and I like the Wind.

Creative Art Opportunities

🌈Dot painting on coffee filters
🌈Painting with frozen cubes of paint
🌈Collage with cottonballs
🌈Painting with cottonballs
🌈Drip watercolor paints onto paper
🌈Paint with Cool Whip
🌈Mix flour into white paint for textured “snow” paint
🌈Arrange stones on dark construction paper and set them in bright sunlight to bleach designs

Hands On Experiences

⛅️Water table with sponges, drip cups, pipettes, or funnels ⛅️
⛅️Water table with a few ice cubes⛅️
⛅️”Hail” spheres of ice (sphere mold or tied-off glove) ⛅️
⛅️Blowing feathers or pieces of tissue paper
⛅️Rain tube (rice, beans, or lentils for sound)
⛅️Rain tube (95% Mineral oil, 5% faintly-colored water)
🌿Use ribbons on a stick to explore the wind
🌿Play outside in the rain
🌿Take a rainy walk with an umbrella or raincoat
🌿Put on boots and find a rain puddle to splash in

Songs to Learn and Sing

“If All the Raindrops” – Written for the children’s television show Barney, apparently

If all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops
Oh what a rain that would be
Standing outside with my mouth open wide
“Ahh, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah!”
If all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops
Oh what a rain that would be

If all the snowflakes were candy bars and milkshakes
Oh what a snow that would be
Standing outside with my mouth open wide
“Ahh, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah!”
If all the snowflakes were candy bars and milkshakes
Oh what a snow that would be

If all the sunbeams were bubblegum and icecream
Oh what a sun that would be
Standing outside with my mouth open wide
“Ahh, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah!”
If all the sunbeams were bubblegum and icecream
Oh what a sun that would be

“Rain, Rain, Go Away” – This children’s song has changed a bit over the last three hundred years of singing, following the tune of “A Tisket a Tasket.”

Rain, rain, go away
Come again another day
Little children want to play
Rain, rain, go away

“It’s Raining, It’s Pouring” – This is shares a tune with Rain, Rain, Go away. There are several lyrical variations.

It’s raining, it’s pouring
The old man is snoring
He went to bed
And bumped his head
And slept until the morning

“Mister Sun” – Recorded by Raffi in 1970, but unclear in origin
Oh Mr. Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden Sun
Please shine down on me
Oh Mr. Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden Sun
Hiding behind a tree
These little children are asking you
To please come out so we can play with you
Oh, Mr. Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden Sun
Please shine down on me!

“Sol Solecito” (Tune: “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring” with variation)

Sol solecito
Callientame un poquito
Por hoy por manana
Por toda le semana

Luna lunera
Cascabellera
Manana volare
Porque el mundo me espera

“The Ants Go Marching” – Robert D. Singleton, 1990 (though the popularity of the tune dates to the American civil war)

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah
The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah
The ants go marching one by one
The little one stops to suck his thumb
And they All. Go. Marching. Down.
To the ground. To get out. Of the Rain
Boom Boom Boom

… Two by two… tie his shoe…
… Three by three… climb a tree…
… Four by four… shut the door…
… Five by five… jump and jive…
… Six by six… pick up sticks…
… Seven by seven… watch the heavens…
… Eight by eight…shut the gate…
… Nine by nine… check the time…
… Ten by ten… THE END!

NIYN – Weather on Spotify
All playlists are works in progress and are actively curated when I have a unit in play or preparation, so new songs may appear and old songs may be removed if they don’t suit my designs.