Category: Weather and Climate

• Key idea 1: “Weather” describes daily experience, while “climate” describes weather patterns over many years, e.g. Identifying different local seasonal weather conditions, and also the different climates of countries around the world (UC1.1).
• Key idea 2: Everyone needs sustainable living spaces, e.g. Learning about clever indigenous housing designs from around the world (UC6.4).

Emergent learning:

We cannot teach children the science of Climate Change and Global Warming in the earliest years but if they are to understand it later, they first need to know what CLIMATE is. At first, children learn about WEATHER, and then they learn that Climate means something different to Weather. We can help children learn about weather through daily conversation about the rain, wind and temperature.

It’s only when children have differentiated between different weather conditions, we can talk about weather as a subject. Likewise, when we are ready to talk about “Climate” with children, we need to first give the child a lot of examples of different climates.  When we introduce children to the subject of Climates, we can do this by talking about the way people live in different countries, because the local climate effects what they eat, how they dress, and how they make our homes. We all need nutrition, clothes, and houses and we can show children how clever people around the world create these things in different climate conditions.

Activity recommendation:

We can incorporate climate awareness in their play with small world animals – in many Montessori schools, children are given large continental floor maps to play with – they place the animals on the continents they live in – we can do that with picture cards showing food, clothing and houses as well.

Other Book Recommendations: