Below are ideas for extending this topic beyond the activity & exploration which you just completed.

• Lesson Assessment and Answer Key
• Readings: Three readings with comprehension questions.
• Language Arts activity: Cloud Poetry
• Lesson extension: More sights in the sky
• Activity: Weather Watcher’s Journal
• Activity: Make a Wind Vane and learn to estimate wind speed.
• Try this at home: How Far Away Is That Thunderstorm?

These Common-Core-aligned readings are free with registration on ReadWorks. All readings include comprehension questions.

• Whys of Weather: Rain — What makes rain fall? (Grade 3)
• Summer vacation — A story about predicting the weather. (Grade 3)
• The Big Storm — Three friends are caught in a storm while canoeing in a lake. (Grade 4)

Poets and scientists both carefully observe and describe the world around them. Develop these skills with your students by having them write poetry about clouds.

• Read Clouds, a poem that compares clouds to sheep.
  
• Show your students pictures of clouds from the Cloudman’s Gallery. Ask students to describe these clouds. Fill the board with cloud words and cloud comparisons.
  
• Write a poem that answers a question, like “how does the cloud make you feel?” or “what does the cloud do?” or "what does this cloud make me think about?"

Now that your students are watching the sky with their Storm Spotter’s Guide, they may notice these sky sights.

• Cirrus clouds — These wispy clouds usually signal fair weather. Learn more about them here.
• Contrails — These white lines that stretch across the sky are clouds that form around small particles that exist in airplane exhaust. Learn more about them here and here. See photos of contrails here.

Have your students keep a daily weather journal — observing the sky, drawing the clouds, noting wind direction and weather (sunny/cloudy, warm/cold, windy/still), and predicting the next day’s weather. (Here’s a form for each day’s observations.)

Each day, discuss what students are noticing. Are there any observations they would like to add to their journal? Have they noticed patterns that help predict changes in the weather?

At the end of a week, review the results. Has students’ awareness of the sky and the weather changed?

It’s easy to figure out how far away a thunderstorm is.

When you see a flash of lightning, start counting off the seconds like this: one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand. Stop counting as soon as you hear the thunder.

Every five seconds you count equals about one mile. So if you counted 5 seconds, the storm is about a mile away. If you see lightning but never hear the thunder, the storm is more than 12 miles away — too far for you to hear the thunder.