Weather Words

This year we have made our theme bulletin board interactive and its wonderful! Students utilize our word wall pocket chart all the time during their independent writing. It has really helped those kids who can't seem to think of something to write about. I always encourage kids to write first before they go get the word from the pocket chart. "Try first and check later!" I always hated using a word wall because of this reason...kids always copied and never really tried on their own.  But I love using the theme word wall pocket chart.
Today we introduced a lot of weather "vocabulary" using our Weather word wall pocket chart. Below is a picture of our Weather word wall.  The weather vocabulary cards came from a site called K-3 Teacher Resources (www.k-3teacherresources.com).  There are tons of freebies on that site, but you also need to pay the one year subscription fee.  We did it for a year and got a lot of neat stuff!

I had the kids sitting on the carpet in front of the pocket chart and read aloud the Weather Dictionary that I created a few years ago.  Some of the weather words I included in the book:  snow, rain, tornado, hurricane, thunder, lightning.  Then we went back to our tables and read the dictionary as a class doing a choral read.  The dictionary had the vocabulary word missing from the text, so they had to fill in the missing words on each page as we read.  Whenever we read together and fill in the missing words, I find myself saying:  "Fingers are for reading!  Pencils are for writing!" 

You can download a FREE copy of the weather dictionary HERE through Google Docs.  A lot of the clip art is DJ Inkers:  www.djinkers.com.  Here's the cover page and the "wind" page:

We had about 7 minutes left of theme time, so that's when we did the Weather Riddles that I created yesterday.  The kids LOVED the riddles activity.  They were such good listeners...and they all knew when it was their turn to come up and read the answer to the riddle.  (See my previous post about Weather Riddles cards.)