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Is Today a Good Day to Fly a Kite? Four Ways to Help Your Child Learn About the Weather and Math

By Frances Nankin

These days, it seems everyone is talking a lot about the weather, but what can you actually do about it? Use these quick tips from to take measurements, make observations, and engage your child in some fun and educational math-based weather-watching.

1. What’s the temperature outside? Read the thermometer.

Reading a thermometer is a great habit to get into with your child before venturing outside, and gives kids practice reading a temperature scale. As you read the thermometer with your child, you’ll quickly see that it’s not difficult to measure the temperature when the top of the bar is exactly opposite a number, but what does it mean when it is between two numbers? How many degrees do those little hash marks represent? If your child is having difficulty reading the temperature, try enlarging a section of the thermometer scale to make it easier to talk about how to figure it out. For example, on a piece of paper you might draw the section between 60 and 70 degrees. When you divide the scale into five equal parts (using four hash marks), help you child see the hash marks represent more than 60, less than 70, and since there are five equal parts, each mark must stand for two degrees. (You can have your child count by twos from 60 to 70 to confirm this. Ask: What if the scale between 60 and 70 were divided in two equal sections with one hash mark? (The mark must represent 5 degrees.) Do the same for 10 equal sections (9 hash marks). 

2. Look for patterns in your weather.

Tracking the weather in your area day to day, week to week, or even month to month is an excellent way to give your child experience collecting and analyzing data, using math in a way that is vital to understanding the world around us. One simple activity is to measure and record the temperature at the same time each morning and night. Make a table with columns labeled with the hours you take your measurements (8:30A.M. and 8:30P.M., for example) and rows labeled with the days of the week. Record the temperatures in each ‘time/date’ cell. At the end of a week, invite your child to talk about what the data reveals. You might ask, Do you see a pattern in how the temperature changes from morning to night? And the following week, you might ask your child to predict how the temperature will change on any given day from morning to night.

3. Measure how much rain fell after a storm.

Your child will enjoy measuring how much rain fell after a storm, and doing so provides valuable experience working with fractions and mixed numbers. To measure rainfall in a 24-hour period, place a flat bottomed, straight-sided see-through container (a plastic quart-size storage container works well) in an area free of overhangs or tree branches. After a rain storm, help your child hold a ruler upright in the container and measure to where the surface of the water comes. To help your child understand the hash marks representing fractions of an inch, use permanent markers to color each fraction hash mark differently. Color the 1/2 inch mark red, for example, the 1/4 inch marks blue, and the 1/8 inch marks green.

For fun, once you’ve measured how much rain fell, figure out how much snow would have fallen had the conditions been right to turn the rain into snow. To do this, multiply the amount of rain that fell by ten. (For example, ONE inch of rain would have been about 10 inches of snow.)

4. Measure the strength of the wind.

Is today a good day to fly a kite, or sail a boat, or play outside with a pinwheel? It’s easy enough to look outside to see if the wind is pushing hard on things like tree branches or people’s hats, but just how hard is the wind blowing? And does it blow harder in one place than another? You don’t need fancy equipment to find the answer: Your child can make a simple wind gauge, practice reading numbers to compare wind strengths, and find the windiest place to fly that kite.

To measure the wind’s strength, you need a length of string with a paper clip attached to one end, and a number scale to see how far the wind pushes the string when it blows. To make the scale, anchor the string to one corner of the cardboard and swing it upwards to draw an arc (because the string will arc upwards when the wind blows). Add equally spaced hash marks along the arc and number them, starting at 0 where the string hangs down straight. Together with your child, point this simple gauge into the wind and read off where on the scale the string has been pushed.

Frances Nankin is Executive Producer and Editorial Director of CYBERCHASE, which airs daily on PBS KIDS GO.