Here are some ideas for simple, fun weather related fieldwork which you can try out in the school grounds. We started off with 10, but then had more!

• Bubble chase – see which way bubbles drift in the wind to determine the wind direction and speed. Here is some guidance.
• Does rain always come from dark clouds? Use our colour chart to find out. Or, use a home made cyanometer to see how blue the sky is, and link it to art or to discussions about why the sky is blue, and how pollution affects it.
• Microclimate – how long does it take an ice cube to melt in different places?
• Identifying cloud types. You could use our cloud bookmark, cloud wheel or cloud chart.



• Which way are the clouds moving? You can use the OPAL guide to making a nephoscope for this.
• Wind speed – use the Beaufort scale to estimate the wind speed.
• Cloudiness – you could either record as ‘Clear sky, mostly clear, mostly cloudy or overcast’, or record in oktas, using a cloud mirror (using a ruler, draw a grid of lines onto a square mirror so that you have 16 equal size boxes; look at the sky with the mirror. How many boxes are mostly cloudy? Divide by 2 to give oktas and repeat for different bits of the sky to get an average).
• Evaporation – draw around the edge of a puddle to see how long it takes to evaporate (guidance here).
• Rainfall – make your own raingauge using our DIY sheet. If you can, use paraffin wax (sold by candle making suppliers) rather than jelly.
• Collecting and looking at snowflakes with a hand lens or tracing frost patterns on car windows.
• Raindrop size measuring using a sand tray or blotting paper. There is a fairly high level guide here but it could easily be adapted for all levels.
• Where is the warmest/ coldest spot in the school? Or, if you want to take wind speed into account too, Where would you put a picnic bench?
• What’s the temperature in your school grounds today and somewhere else in the world/ UK?A very good way of seeing this is to use WOW. By zooming in and out, you can compare temperatures locally and around the world.
• Record temperatures for a week in your area and in another city elsewhere? Can you compare them?
• Contrails (OPAL) – Use this guide to record what sort of contrails you can see.