After plenty of thermal sensory play, V knew the difference between hot and cold. Soon, V started noticing the differences in temperatures, and that the weather changes everyday. We are blessed to stay in a place where we get to witness plenty of sunshine, rain, cold and storms.

“Where does the rain come from, ma?”

V can sit and watch the rain for hours on end. When the weather forecast for the day used to read rains, she would be bummed, but would sit and watch them at the window happily. One fine day, she asked us where the rains came from. We answered, “the clouds”. After a week of observing different colored and different shaped clouds, she deduced that when we have grey clouds in the morning, we invariably have rain that day.

“But how do the clouds get rain ma?”, she asked. We learnt a little about evaporation and did a simple cotton squeeze activity to reinforce the concept.

Thanks to our books, we also learnt that the rain is needed for plants to grow and fields dry up otherwise.

“Why is it dark so soon?”

Obviously, the concern was that we couldn’t spend enough time in the park during winter. Like we learnt while on our nature walks, we also noticed that the leaves were yellow, and too many of them were falling on our balcony. We feel cold during winter, and wanted to sleep. Was a great time to learn about hibernation, too. We read that, the cold we feel is a fraction of what it is in places like Antarctica, which is why animals there have a lot of fur.

“Summer already!?”

And suddenly, one day we noticed that it started getting too hot, the plants needed more watering and we did not need warm water to bathe in. It was brighter and we were sweaty all the time too. By now, V had a fair idea of seasons.

Seasons

We did simple reinforcement activities by sticking flowers/dried leaves/ snowflakes on trees. We also dressed up our dolls according to the season.
I highly recommend the Weather book for learning about both regular as well as scary ones. V loves hearing about thunderstorms and lightning, clouds and rainbows.

At the moment, she is very keen to know about the types of clouds and is researching about the upcoming cyclone.