It Looked Like a Cumulus Cloud...

    I'm sitting at an airport so small they board on the tarmac, when the dreaded announcement came across - 3 hour delay.  So what's a girl to do but lesson plan?   

With Utah forecasts showing cloudy skies over the next week, we'll be casually revisiting our Clouds unit.  We started it off with a great classic, It Looked Like Spilt Milk by Charles G. Shaw.  I was a little worried about how fourth graders would like this book but, with some humorous inflections thrown in the reading, they loved it!
After learning about the different types of clouds for 2 weeks, we made our own "Spilt Milk" pages.  I know the cotton ball clouds project is a classic one, and I've used it over and over as a summative assessment.  Along with the correct placement and labeling of each cloud type, the kids also wrote by each one,
"It looked like a _______________, but it was a ________ cloud." to mirror the book.  Matching each cloud type with their own visual representation helped the kids keep the types and atmosphere level straight.