A Stormy Day Lesson

Today was rather difficult to get outside like I had planned.  It seemed like every time we went to put our shoes on to go out to play the sky opened up or there was a loud clap of thunder.  Thankfully I had planned on discussing storms as part of the science lesson today, so the outdoors was a wonderful exhibit.

We started the day by completing Day 3 in the work books.  There was no cursive writing today, so A was a happy kid.  Instead we discussed different types of sentences.  K's page was rather simple because it was the letter "C", since he is already reading basic books, letters are "easy peasy."  The boys really enjoyed writing a fiction paragraph yesterday, so I continued the theme.  The topic was a story starring their Lego people that they colored in yesterday.  True to form, they both came up with some real cool stories.

As I stated earlier, storms were the topic for today.  I wanted to really cover Hurricanes with the kids. We live in a hurricane prone area, and neither one of the boys has actually been through anything larger than a Category 1, so the thought of a hurricane can be rather scary.  We started out by watching Bill Nye the Science Guy-"Storms".  I found the video on YouTube and it is the complete episode without commercials.  Then we went to our local new station website and watched a video on how we can prepare for a hurricane.  We went over the hurricane prep list and discussed why each of the items was needed and how much we as a family would need to acquire.  You can find the list at the Bay News 9 website.

A is also in charge of tracking the storms each day on his very own hurricane tracking map.  I printed it out from the NOAA website, the numbers are rather small and hard to read.  Normally the local stores have maps and "hurricane season guides" out in the stores, but I haven't seen any so far.  Honestly, it scares me that so many people in the area are completely unprepared because it has been 10 years since we have had a hurricane, and the community has become rather comfortable.  So far there is nothing in the Gulf or the Atlantic, but that has a habit of swiftly changing at a moment's notice.

A's tracking map- There is one in the Pacific!