Weather Art Lesson Plans for Elementary Students

Weather Art Lesson Plans for Elementary Students
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Art Lesson Plans on Weather

Weather is such a fun topic to create art projects, and develop weather art lesson plans. You can work with almost any medium and create a beautiful interpretation of weather.

For early elementary students, I love to work with basics of weather (temperature, seasons, today’s weather), and then start to build on cloud development, rain, different types of storms, etc. From the basics of weather, I enjoy having children work on weather wheels. These can be downloaded from many sites, including scholastic. They are best printed on cardstock or heavy paper and then cut out with a brass fastener in the middle, allowing for children to rotate their spinner to the correct weather of the day.

Children that love to color, draw, and write, can also create a weather journal that allows them to share details of their thoughts on the weather for each day. This is a great activity to participate in during Spring, when we see drastic shifts in temperature, cloud formations, and growth, since students can have a visual of what the rain helps produce.

When discussing weather, the polar opposites are always shared, sunny, and rainy. A fun cloud project can be made for children to show their favorite type of weather. First, take a template of a cloud and make one for each student out of thick construction paper. Second, allow children to add cotton balls to the surface of their cloud. Second, if children want to make a rain cloud, they will take a spray bottle with a mixture of watercolor and water, and spray their cloud a gray color. Once the cloud is dry, kids can add blue Easter grass or crepe paper to resemble the rain falling from the clouds. Children that choose to have a sunny cloud can add yellow crepe paper to show the sun shining around their cloud.

For art lesson plans on weather for older elementary students, this cloud wheel is a great introductory lesson to the different types of clouds. At the site below, there is a great template for a cloud wheel. I love this wheel for expansion on building children’s knowledge about the different types of clouds. They can start to observe their surroundings in nature and learn why there are different types of clouds. There are many books that can read with great pictures to emphasize that these clouds are seen all around the world, and students can start to identify what the different types of clouds mean. https://teemss2.concord.org/artwork/pdf_files/u04_i01_cloud_wheel.pdf

Older elementary students can also explore with painting a variety of clouds, using a mixture of paints to recreate the dimension of the cloud, as well as the texture that we can see in the sky.

Older elementary students can also make a book or mini book representing different types of weather. They also always enjoy tracking weather using barometers and other weather instruments, that they can use to enhance their books and provide reports utilizing both science and art lessons.