Weather activities to get pupils thinking, talking, and writing
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Weather is something we all experience. It's familiar, universal, and a topic suitable for all ages. It can also be a brilliant tool to get children thinking, talking, and writing. Since children already understand what it feels like to be cold, wet, or hot, educators can use these everyday experiences to engage learners without needing to explain complex concepts.
To support this, LearningGrids offers a wide range of ready-made weather resources. The sets are designed to help you personalise learning, promote independence, and nurture writing success.
Introduce the topic of weather with a Clicker Book
Clicker Books are a great starting point for a literacy lesson. Simply choose your topic and select the level of difficulty best suited to your learners.
Teddy’s Weather - Read a Book
This book introduces weather vocabulary through simple, repetitive sentence structures. Each page names a type of weather and shares how Teddy responds to it. This makes it ideal for young learners and children with English as an additional language (EAL). The related writing sets reinforce the sentence patterns to support overlearning. They also help boost early writers’ confidence in sentence writing, vocabulary, and comprehension.
Weather and Climate - Read a Book
This book contains longer and more complex passages, which are ideal for older children. The book provides clear explanations of key vocabulary and concepts, such as the difference between weather and climate, and what a meteorologist does. You can use the related sets to help learners communicate their understanding through writing.
Engage learners with interactive activities
We have published lots of activities that focus on the topic of weather and offer scaffolded writing support for learners of different abilities.
Weather Symbols – Look and Read
This Matching Set features recognisable weather icons with labels. To complete the activity, pupils need to select the word from the list to match the weather shown in the main image. This helps learners with the recognition and reading of simple weather words. In ‘Edit Mode,’ the difficulty of the task can be easily adjusted to suit different learning levels.
Good and Bad Weather
Explore the positive and negative sides of different weather conditions using these Talk Sets and Clicker Boards. Each set includes a graphic to spark ideas and provides varied ways to record discussions and research findings. Children can capture their thoughts orally or in writing. Additionally, you can turn their ideas on a Clicker Board into a Word Bank for added scaffolding to support independent writing tasks.
Today’s Weather
This Connect Set offers a great short task for the start of each day. This task can be especially engaging for neurodivergent children who often benefit from structured routine activities. The resource reinforces days, months, and common weather vocabulary. Sharing the child’s completed sentences on your interactive whiteboard is a great way to celebrate success and give your reluctant writers a positive start to the day.
Build up topic-specific vocabulary
Building a strong vocabulary boosts confidence and helps learners express their ideas. You can help learners acquire the necessary vocabulary with the help of resources like the ones below.
Weather Words
Ideal for writing story settings, or comparing different weather types, this simple Word Bank includes keywords for each type of weather. In ‘Edit Mode,’ a sentence starter could be added to offer more scaffolding and support literacy development.
Describe the Weather
Building on this, these Word Banks are designed for more confident writers. They include familiar vocabulary alongside more expressive language, such as ‘sludgy’ and ‘scorching’, to inspire writers to be more adventurous with their word choices.
Shades of Meaning
To enhance vocabulary development further, encourage learners to consider word intensity by using one of these Clicker Boards alongside the Word Banks above. This task can expand children’s word choices and improve the quality of their writing.
You can explore the full Geography – Weather & Climate category on LearningGrids.
If you want to learn more about the resources we offer on LearningGrids, you can read our blogs:
