Celebrate Spring in Key Stage 1

Hamilton's Weather Experts topic includes a series of lively activities that will help your children develop locational knowledge and early geographical skills. The Seasonal Change block starts with the a session on the nature of spring, and continues through the seasons with a strong emphasis on using art to express ideas about the seasons.

'Spring time' explores the feelings and colours of spring through the paintings of Guiseppe Arcimboldo, whose eccentric artistic creations can hardly fail to engage people of all ages. You can teach this session as a stand-alone afternoon, or go on and explore the other seasons.

Stanley Spencer will help your children express summertime; John Everrett Millais gets them into an autumnal feel; while Claude Monet evokes winter.

You can take the theme further by exploring the other blocks in this weather-based topic. Try:

• creating and filming weather forecasts,
• learning about the countries and capital cities of the UK,
• understanding the points of the compass and weather symbols,
• building simple weather measuring instruments,
• contributing to a class weather station and weather chart and
• working towards a final art display.

Our Weather Experts resources on extreme weather conditions will get you looking at homes adapted to different climates around the world and creating a storm-resistant den and a flood-resistant house. Your class can learn about the continents, the poles and the 5 key climate zones. Together, you can create a class travel agency, travel brochures and passport travel stamps. A focus on hot climates will lead you to explore weather by designing, constructing, decorating and playing musical instruments to accompany performances of South African weather chants.

As you begin to understand the effects of climate change, you will be encouraged to consider how we can combat these changes, to create a class eco-code and to perform a class assembly about Antarctica, penguins and climate change.

Inspire your children to study the seasons and weather patterns in the United Kingdom and the key world climates in the first week of Spring.