What's the Weather There?

Download this thermometer here.

Spring break is coming up so I figured it would be fun to take an imaginary trip to five U.S. capital cities. Just the idea of this pretend adventure made my son giddy!

“Where we goin’, Mom?" he asked. From a bowl full of papers printed with each capital city, my son drew one. This was our first stop: Sacramento, CA. (Woo Hoo! On a cool February day in the Midwest, it was a real treat to go there, even if it was just in our minds!)

I handed my son a plastic sheet protector filled with two papers: a map of the United States on one side and a thermometer on the other.

We used Google Maps to locate where in California the city of Sacramento was located. My son made a dot on his sheet protector-covered map with a dry-erase marker. Then we headed over to weather.com to see what the temps were like that day. My son wrote the name of the city and temperature next to the thermometer and colored in the mercury up to 65 degrees Fahrenheit with the dry-erase marker.

We made stops at four other capital cities - Juneau, AK; Charleston, WV; Bismarck, ND; and Salt Lake City, UT. What a blast we had on our virtual vacay!

When all the cities were identified on the maps and thermometers were colored, we “returned home” and I asked my son the following:

• What was the hottest city we visited?
• What was the coolest?

Then he put the cities (i.e. thermometers) in order from coolest to warmest temperature.

Lastly, I put his subtraction skills to the test and asked him to tell me how much warmer it was from one city to the next.

“Why didn’t we go more places, Mom?” he asked when we were done. It looks like more “vacations” are in order!