Weather Symbols

Six weather symbols are drawn in teal circles down the left of this kindergarten page and six word cards stand down the right. Each has a small coral dot on its inner edge. The symbols on the sheet shown are a rain cloud, a smiling sun, a rainbow, a grey cloud, a storm cloud with a lightning bolt and a snowflake; the words are storm, snow, cloud, sun, rain and rainbow, in an order that matches none of them. The child draws a line from each picture to its word.

The symbols are the ones a five-year-old will meet on a television forecast and in the weather corner of a classroom, so the page teaches a piece of print convention rather than a fact about the sky. The rain cloud and the storm cloud are the pair worth pointing at: they differ only by the bolt, and the storm symbol carries no rain drops at all, which is exactly the shorthand a real forecast icon uses.

One sheet, six lines. This is the naming page of the weather family and the one to give first, because the chart, the forecast and the letter-box sheets all use the same six symbols. Rainbow is the odd one in the set — it is not a forecast icon anywhere — but it is the symbol children ask for, and it is the easiest word on the page to read.