How to Teach Weather and Seasons in Kindergarten and First Grade

Weather and seasons might just be the perfect kindergarten science topic. Why? Because kids already have opinions about it. “I hate when it’s cold.” “I love jumping in puddles.” “Why is it so hot today?” They come in with real-world experience, and your job is to give them the language and curiosity to go deeper.

Here’s how to make your weather and seasons unit one they’ll love, learn and talk about.

Start with vocabulary — and make it visible

Before anything else, build a shared language. A weather word wall with words like sunny, cloudy, windy, stormy, freezing, hot gives students the tools they need to describe what they observe. Add picture cards at learning areas so they can practise independently, and watch how quickly those words start appearing in their writing and conversations.

Make weather observation a daily ritual

One of the simplest things you can do is include weather into your morning routine. A daily weather chart — where students observe, record, and discuss the day’s conditions — builds genuine scientific habits over time (include both individual weather diaries and whole class observations) By the end of the week, you can look back together: “What patterns did we notice? Were there more sunny days or cloudy days this week?” Adding a thermometer outside the classroom adds another layer, and students absolutely love to read it.

Explore clothing, food and activities

Discuss why we wear t’shirts and shorts in summer and coats and hats in winter, use worksheets that allow students to sort clothing according to the weather, or students could dress a class soft toy according to a specified weather.

Explore why we eat hot soup in winter and watermelon in summer, create a collage of foods we eat when it’s hot/cold or have students draw and write about their favorite summer/winter etc. foods.

Discuss seasonal activities and sports we play or watch, create a class graph of activities students like to do on a hot or cold or rainy day. Match the activities to the weather.

Explore Picture Books both fiction and nonfiction

It is a no-brainer but of course include lots of picture books and weather related reading. Through books, your students will learn about all kinds of weather – some they may experience daily, and some they may never have experienced or even heard of.

Include experiments (they’re honestly so easy)

Hands-on experiments are so much fun — and the ones that work best for kindergarten are simple, visual, and a little bit dramatic.

Rain in a jar — hot water, and ice — genuinely mesmerising and a perfect intro to the water cycle
Pine cone weather station — pine cones open in dry weather, close when rain is coming. Free, natural, and kids are obsessed
Cloud in a jar — shaving cream clouds, food colouring “rain” — to create a mini cloud right in the classroom

None of these need specialist equipment, and all of them give students something concrete to connect to the bigger concepts.

Teach the four seasons with crafts that do double duty

Seasonal crafts aren’t just fun — they’re doing real learning work. Include a seasons wheel to help teach the 4 seasons cycle, make dioramas, create booklets or flip books and * tree crafts comparing all four seasons: these activities build comparison and categorisation skills while keeping little hands busy. Clothing sorts (“Would you wear this in winter or summer?”) are especially great for mixed-ability groups because they’re accessible for everyone and naturally spark discussion.

*Create a large tree study poster, draw or print a large tree on a poster decorate it according to each season pink blossoms for spring, green leaves for summer, orange and red leaves for fall/autumn and bare branches with cotton ball snow for winter.

Seasonal nature walks – go for a walk outside each season and observe, draw and or collect leaves etc. to create seasonal interest areas.

Collect fall/autumn leaves use them in art, group and order them according to size, color or shape.

Move from concrete to abstract — real experiences and crafts first, then worksheets and recording activities once the concepts have landed.

Weave it across the curriculum

Weather and seasons are too good to keep in science time only.

Literacy: weather and weather related vocabulary, weather journals, labelling weather, weather tools, non-fiction mini-books, read aloud weather stories, forecasting weather, opinion writing (“Which season is the best?”) narrative writing
Maths: graphing daily weather across a week or month, patterns in seasonal change, counting the number of rainy days, reading a thermometer
Art: cloud paintings, leaf prints, seasonal crowns and crafts

Cross-curricular connections make the learning stick — and they make your planning more efficient.

A note for Southern Hemisphere classrooms

If you’re teaching in New Zealand, Australia, or the UK, look for resources that include both hemispheres. Your autumn is someone else’s spring, and a good seasons unit should reflect the world your students actually live in — not assume everyone experiences December as winter.

What a complete unit looks like

A well-rounded weather and seasons unit for kindergarten includes: vocabulary resources and word walls, daily weather recording charts, two or three simple experiments with recording sheets, seasonal crafts and sorting activities, differentiated worksheets for mixed ability groups, and picture books to anchor each section.

If you’d rather not build all of that from scratch, my Seasons & Weather Science Unit has 146 pages covering all of the above — with both US Letter and A4 formats, and Northern and Southern Hemisphere editions included. It has been reviewed by over 900 teachers and has everything you need to run a complete unit without the prep stress.