Whales Are Weather Watchers!
/The Whales have spent the last two weeks diving deep into an exploration of weather. We started by learning about how vital the sun is for all weather (and all life!) on earth. We learned that the sun heats the earth, and the earth heats the air. We became the sun and the earth and explored how the sun makes our day and night, and the position of the earth relative to the sun is what makes our seasons. We had lots of fun with our shadows and discovered that the length of our shadows changed depending on where the sun sat in the sky.
When we moved on to the study of wind, we had enormous fun experimenting with moving air molecules! We made kites and sailboats and explored how different objects get carried by the wind. We talked about how the sun creates wind by heating the earth at varying degrees. We learned that cool air pushes on warm air and makes it rise, creating those swirling wind patterns around us.
The Whales have become expert cloud watchers as well! We have learned how to identify cirrus, cumulus, stratus and nimbus clouds, and can pretty successfully predict the weather, just by looking at the clouds in the sky!
In the next couple of weeks, Whales will become meteorologists, giving a daily weather report to other students at the ELC. Stay tuned for more on that!
