Weather girl

Every day Sophie and i have a conversation about the weather. After all, that is what the English do. We peer out of the window and discuss what we see.

So i decided that i would make her a weather map of her own so she could place the weather on it.  Map.... well a map according to a two year old that is and her world is her home and garden that she sees the weather blowing about in.

I got a sheet of metal from the local hardware store and some craft foam and hot glued this all around the sheet to protect Sophie from shape corners and metal edges

I then covered the metal in coloured paper and made simple images of a house supposedly our house even though it looks nothing like out house and a tree which were all stuck fixed to the board

I then started making different weather shapes like these clouds which i cut from felt. With the clouds i used my felting tool to apply Marino wool to them to give them a more of a fluffy cloud like appearance, although i didn't do this with all the felt shapes i cut out.

As these were rather flimsy as felt shapes i drew round them onto card and cut and hot glued these together and then attached magnets to the back.

I took a photo of Sophie and again stuck this to card and covered her in a bit of clear tape on the front and magnets on the back so she could move herself round the garden 

i also gave her little activities to interact her character to the weather such as snowman for snow and a kite for wind

Wind took a little thought as it is invisible, my first thought was faces with puffy cheeks but this is hard to create out of felt so went for these swirls instead and Sophie got them straight away with out me having to explain, and she just loved putting the kite into her character hand.  I used some Early learning letters and number magnets to put the date so we could start talking about months and days and hopefully this will start to make sense matching weather to seasons, but we will see how that goes.

She loves to play with her weather board and copies the weather outside and even predicts some weather that we are not having just so she can put the big balloon in her hand or have a rainbow in the sky.