Weather Chart, Monday to Sunday

Seven tall day boxes fill this kindergarten page, four along the top row and three below, labelled Monday through to Sunday. Each is empty, dashed and large enough for a crayon drawing. In the eighth cell of the grid sits a panel of the six weather symbols the family uses — sun, cloud, rain, storm, snow and rainbow — printed small for copying. Every day of the week the child looks outside and draws that day's symbol in its box.

This is the one page in the batch that is not finished in a sitting. It turns a naming exercise into a week of observation, and the size of the boxes is the invitation: there is room for a whole sky rather than a tick. Because the symbols are printed on the same sheet, a child who cannot yet draw a storm cloud has a model in front of them, and because the days are named, the chart doubles as a week of reading practice.

One sheet, seven days, seven drawings. Pin it up on Monday and do it at the same time each morning; a class set makes a good end-of-week comparison, since children rarely agree about cloudy. The symbol panel has no heading of its own, so say out loud that the eighth box is the key and not an extra day.