Our First Toddler Cloud Study

I've had quite a bit of training in interest based learning throughout my years of teaching elementary and middle school, and yet, I was still caught off guard when I saw this lesson unfolding right before my eyes, all at Little Man's request!  I had planned a day of playing outside, lunch with Daddy and visiting the library, but after only a few minutes in our backyard, most of my plans changed.  Little Man looked up at the sky, pointed to the clouds above and said "Mommy I see a doggie!" 

We have a family friend who previously taught LM how to lay in the grass and watch the clouds.  I guess he get more from it than I realized!  Our next half hour or so was spent laying in the grass, staring up at the cloud filled sky, talking about clouds and the shapes we saw in them.

Here is a picture of "the doggie" Little Man saw in the clouds.  Being just over two years old, he couldn't help me see it, but he definitely convinced me it's there!



As you may be able to tell, we live in a rather urban environment
and our view of the sky is rarely unobscured by wires.

When we finally decided to head back in the house, we continued our Cloud studies with the following activities:

We have recently started having school time at the dining room table, and Little Man gets excited every time I mention it.  Here he is climbing into his chair asking "School time mommy??"  Of course, he brought Henry and Thomas to learn about clouds as well!

Little Man has always been partial to books with real life photos as the illustrations so, we looked through the book Clouds by Trudi Trueit. I read parts of the text and we talked about the photos of the different types of clouds. 

Here is Little Man telling Henry about his "favorite" clouds from the book. I wish I had the video camera running for this moment!

He was very interested in the pictures of the storm clouds throughout the book. We talked about rain and snow as well and how those darker clouds are a sign that a storm is coming.

  We finished up by with this cloud art project:
 

The finished product!

This project allowed LM to practice his skills with holding scissors and cutting paper and gluing objects to paper.  We also continued to discuss clouds and the things he had learned from watching them outside and reading the book.

We started with a lot of cutting practice.  Little Man seriously LOVES using his scissors and he had a blast making the grass for his cloud picture.  He even made sure he showed Henry what he had made when he was done!

I cut one of his grass paper edges off the green, glued it to his sky paper, and then the real fun began!

Here are some pictures of the fun!  Little Man spread the glue on the paper (with a little help that he preferred not to have) and then started adding cotton balls to cover all the glue.  And he was extremely thorough!  He just couldn't leave one bit of glue showing...I guess I've rubbed off on him more than I thought.  And he's only two!  ;)