Weather Sensory Bottles

Today I want to share with you a really easy and fun project you can do with your kids to learn more about weather. 

We include the weather as part of our circle time everyday. I found a super cute felt weather wheel in Target's dollar section over the summer and used it for the first few weeks of this school year. Then Emmett got a hold of it and ripped the felt window off of it! Good thing it was only a dollar, right? So, now I needed a different way to discuss the weather with the kids during circle time. I was thinking I might just make my own weather wheel and I still might, but then when I was planning our weather unit I decided to make some sensory bottles and used weather as a theme. Now we use the sensory bottles during our circle time and Emerson has fun picking out which bottle best represents the current weather that day.

Here is what you will need if you want to make your own:

• 5-6 empty plastic bottles (I used a 6 pack of small Dasani water bottles)

• water

• food coloring

• cotton balls

• pom-poms

• pony beads

• glitter

• plastic crystals

• pipe cleaners

• craft foam

• any other materials you want to use to represent weather

Sunny- We filled our bottle with water and added one drop of blue food coloring. I cut out a sun from yellow craft foam and placed it inside the bottle.

Cloudy- We placed three cotton balls in the bottle and filled it with water. As time has gone on the cotton balls have expanded and the whole bottle looks cloudy.

Windy-  We placed two cotton balls in the bottle and made "swirls of wind" out of gold pipe cleaners and placed them inside the bottle. Then we filled it with water. After a few days the whole bottle turned a bit yellowish. I'm assuming it is from the pipe cleaners so we may remake this one with a different material. Another idea I had was to find some beads that look like leaves and put those in with the cotton balls. You could also use white pom-poms in place of the cotton balls.

Rainy-  We cut a few blue raindrops from craft foam and then added some dark and light blue pony beads to the bottle. Then we filled it with water and added a few white pom-poms for clouds.

Snowy-  We found some clear plastic crystals at the dollar store and used some of these to represent snow/ice. We also placed white pom-poms and glitter in the bottle and then filled it with water.

Rainbow- Emerson insisted that we do a rainbow bottle. Our Target weather wheel had a rainbow on it and she loves rainbows so I agreed. We used two pony beads for each color of the rainbow and then filled the bottle with water.

We had a lot of fun coming up with ways to represent the weather for our sensory bottles. There are so many possibilities. What things would you use for a weather sensory bottle? I'd love to hear your ideas.