Night School

A few nights ago we had some serious thunderstorms in the wee hours of the morning. Joy has always been afraid of thunder (and other loud, sudden noises), so we weren't surprised to find her at our door saying, "Mom, Dad, I'm scared!" I got up and went to lie down with her in her bed, which is our usual response. However, Joy was very wiggly and not willing to calm down, and it seemed the storm was winding down, so I scooted on back to my own bed.

CRASH! The thunder started up for real just a few minutes later. I didn't even wait for Joy to arrive at our door; I simply got up and said, "Let's go watch the storm!" She was surprised because we usually try to go back to sleep, but this time, the lightning was continual, the thunder was deafening, and the wind was incredible! I wanted to see if there were any weather warnings, and I knew nobody was going to be sleeping (unless it was Dad!).

So we settled onto the couch by the picture window and watched the show. It was reminiscent of John Archambault and Bill Martin Jr's Listen to the Rain: "The lightning-flashing, thunder-crashing, sounding, pounding roaring rain." The electricity went out almost immediately, so I grabbed my smartphone to see the weather... and decided it was time for some homeschooling.

"Hey, Joy!" I said, "Look at this!" And I showed her the weather map. She knows the location and shape of our state, the surrounding states, and most of the states we've visited. I pointed out where the state boundaries were because they were hard to see with all the yellow, orange, and red on the map. She was delighted to see our state and our city.

We talked about what the colors meant and we were both suitably impressed by the colors covering our part of the state. She was a little frightened by the storm, but definitely engaged in the weather map. Then I animated the map.

"Whoa! Mom! Why are the colors moving??!!" And I explained how storms happen when a mass (defined by me as a "bunch") of cool air moved into a mass of warm air. We watched for a few minutes, then Joy exclaimed, "The colors are moving away from us!" So we turned our attention back outside, where, indeed, the storm was calming a bit. We watched the storm move away on the phone and in front of us.

Pretty soon, Joy was confident that the storm was ending, and we went back to bed, calmer and a bit wiser about weather. Another line from Listen to the Rain runs through my head now: "The dripping, dripping, dropping, the slowly, slowly stopping, the fresh, wet, silent, after-time of rain."

Stealth Kindergarten at its best!