Weather Vocabulary Games and Activities

Do you find it difficult to think of weather vocabulary ideas when doing a weather theme with your kids?

Here are some fun word games and activities to try out with your students.

Find a word! A good fill-in weather vocabulary activity!

I found this a good fill in activity or one to give to your kids if they finish tasks early.

Choose a longish weather word such as meteorological or anti-cyclones and ask the kids to find as many little words as they can from the larger word.The more vowels there are in the word the easier it is for the younger children to find simple 3 letter CVC words and older children to find longer words.

If it's a fill in task you could give them a time limit. This does help to focus the mind and limit the chatting!

You could of course make it just that little bit more difficult by limiting them to weather vocabulary words but I tried this myself and I got as far as cycle from anticyclones and then I got stuck!

Remember, children often do far better than us adults!

Rhyme it!

I do a lot of rhyming games and activities with my kindergarten and pre-school kids. The younger they start to identify rhyme the more proficient they will become later.

The more easily they are able to identify words that have the same ending the more confident they will be at having a go at spelling their own words when they learn to write.

This game involves picking a very simple weather vocabulary word.

Have the kids sitting in a circle.

Say the word to the first child, he then has to say a word that rhymes with that word.

For example if you chose sun as your word the second child would say bun and the third child would say fun for example. The game continues until no more rhymes can be found. You then start again with a new word.

You can include 'non words' in the game but obviously you have to establish this beforehand.

Also with older children you can get them to chose their own word and write down as many words they can think of that rhyme with that word. This has an extra bonus as it reinforces the spelling patterns too!

Rhyming Word Worksheet

Download a free rhyming word worksheet!

Get the children to find the words that rhyme with SUN.

Download Worksheet

First letter, last letter!

I like this game as it needs no props whatsoever and can be played almost anywhere! We played it as a family on long car rides picking a different subject each time.

I must admit that using weather vocabulary as the focus may just be a bit too challenging for younger kids but teenagers might go quite a way with it having some background knowledge of world weather.Anyway, here it is:

Start with a simple weather word such as snow. The first player then has to think of a weather word beginning with the last letter of snow therefore 'w'

The 2nd player then says wind and the next player must say a weather word starting with 'd'

And so on until someone cant think of a word and then they say 'End of' and start all over again.

I think with little kids you can allow clothes and items related to weather but establish this at the start of the game.

Acrostic Poems

Acrostic poems are a fun way of introducing weather vocabulary to kids of any age. Just by making the word longer or shorter you can adapt the activity to different ages and abilities.

For kindergarten kids I chose a simple weather word such as SUN and wrote it on the board so we could all do it together.

The word has to be written vertically so it would look like this S

Then we brainstormed words that began with 'S'.

We talked about the kind of word that would be better starting our poem and thought a noun such as Snails would be good.

Then we did the same with 'U' and came to the conclusion that there needed to be a verb or doing word although we thought that we could use 'under' just as well.

We chose 'uncover'

So now we had SNAILS

UNCOVER

NAILS

Our last word was 'nails'. We thought this was great because it rhymed!

The kids loved doing it and wanted to have another go with a different weather word.

Mnemonics

The word Mnemonics sounds daunting but it can be a great way of helping kids remember how to spell tricky words.

You can use mnemonics for any words the kids find hard to remember how to spell.

For example if you were focusing on weather vocabulary as a theme and the kids found the word ICE difficult to spell because of the soft 'C' you could work together to find a sentence or phrase to help them memorise the correct spelling.

Start by writing the word ICE on the board.

Then ask the kids to think of a word that begins with ' I '

They might say I

Then you ask them for a word beginning with 'C' They say CAN

Lastly you say you need a word beginning with 'E' that completes the sentence or phrase.

They come up with Eric [ my kids did actually come up with this word! Think it was to do with a student in the class with this name]

So now we have a memorable phrase for ICE

I Can Eric! So every time you need them to spell ICE. You can remind them of the phrase they made up to help them remember how to spell the word. Ask them to shout it out to you 'I can Eric!!

Try it out with other tricky words you want them to remember!

For more vocabulary ideas go to summer vocabulary and winter vocabulary.