Explore Weather and Climate!: With 25 Great Projects Paperback – January 1, 2012

There is a small set of objects you will need to collect for these experiments, and then your kids can take over. (My kids decided to SHARE a weather station, but if each of your kids wants to make one of their own, then you need extra jars) You'll need 4-6 jelly jars, balloons, empty soda bottles, some poster board or heavy paper, straws, small Dixie-type paper cups, and regular stuff that you have around the house (ice, pepper, salt...).The do-it-yourself projects are VERY doable by children (certainly by age 8 they can manage independently). Just give them the stuff and give them space to work and see what they can do.Not very much global climate change alarmism in the book (pp. 84-85) -- the book is very mild and perfect for children.One quibble about the text -- early in the book, the information about climate treats vast continents as undifferentiated climate zones. ALL of Africa is not "hot and dry", just like ALL of North America (from the Isthmus of Panama to the Arctic Circle) is not one climate zone with one type of temperature descriptor. We are a family who travels to places in the United States with different weather so our Arizona kids can experience snow, rain, forests, springtime, etc. -- so we are purposely aware of the varying climates across large continents.I uploaded some photos of our experiments in "customer images" -- check them out. Every activity in this book that we tried, really worked. The most difficult activity to get results was the "make a rainbow" -- we missed out on bright sunlight and tried to use a flashlight, but we got only very skimpy rainbows.

My niece will love this book. She likes to do activities and she'll be even happier that she can learn about how weather works.