All about rain

Today we received a mysterious letter, written on green paper and sent to us by paper aeroplane! The letter is from an alien called Zok, who wrote to tell us that he is thinking of moving to Earth from his planet Sploogle, but he's not sure what 'weather' is. There is no weather on Sploogle, so he's not sure what it means - what types of weather there are, what things you need for different types of weather, and what things you can do in different kinds of weather. It's our job now to find out all we can about different kinds of weather so we can report back to Zok, and help him decide if he should move to Earth!

We are starting our learning about weather by looking at rain and clouds. This afternoon we talked about different types of rain, like heavy rain and light drizzle, and listened to some sounds of rain. We talked about what happens when there is too much rain and places are flooded. Some of us had seen or heard about flooded places near our homes, like a flooded park, and some of us had seen on the television that some people's homes had water in them from the floods. We also talked about the opposite of flooding - drought. This is when there isn't enough water and places are too dry. Some people don't have enough water where they live. Grace said, "rain is important because when you waste water it's not fair on all the people who don't have water, we're very lucky." We talked about all the reasons why water is important. For example:

"If flowers don't have water they won't grow." - Lilly
"We need water so we can drink it." - Lexi
"We need water for our taps." - Rhys
"The fish need water to live in." - Lucy
"Animals need water to drink." - Aaron
"The shower needs water." - Trystan

We talked about how lucky we are to have water to drink and to wash, and to use for other things, like Harry said "the washing machine needs water." Olivia said, "the poor people don't have water, they have dirty water." We decided we need to be careful about not wasting water - we are going to try and save water by turning taps off when we have finished and drinking up all the water in our water bottles so it doesn't have to be thrown away.

We worked in groups to make posters showing why water is important and how we can help to save water. We had to work together to do the pictures and writing. Then we presented our finished posters to the rest of the class, talking one at a time in a clear voice about what we had done.