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The weather gives children a ready-made laboratory for scientific inquiry. It also gives their parents an opportunity to share the joy of discovery that all too often is the province of the classroom. Capitalize on a science unit at school or use a television weather forecast, book that you're (conveniently) reading, summer storm or similar event to pique your child's interest in understanding and predicting the way climate works. Borrow a book from the library or find a cloud chart online or at a museum to share and ask questions about why the weather changes and where storms come from. Weather is an everyday event that can be fascinating because understanding it develops a sense of competence. It should be an easy step to suggest building instruments to measure --- and predict --- the weather. You and your child will discover how to use the scientific method to understand the weather instead of being at its mercy or --- worse still --- just griping about it.
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Choose some instruments to build from scratch and explore how others are built. Some kids will be keen about building a barometer using a latex glove stretched over a jar that tips a straw up and down along a strip of paper, but others would get a kick out of receiving a hardware store barometer for their birthday that they can keep until adulthood. Most kids can build a wet and dry bulb hygrometer to measure temperature and humidity with a couple of inexpensive thermometers, a length of one-by-two and some old athletic shoelaces. Older kids can build wind vanes and anemometers with a few tin cans, dowels and tin snips; younger children can use paper cups and dowel rods. Use resources and materials at hand to fashion ways to measure basic indicators like temperature, humidity, wind direction and strength, and air pressure. Younger children, of course, will need to focus on just one or two aspects of weather to complete their project. For ideas, explore the library or contact your child's science teacher. Many of the projects published online are from science curricula.
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Don't just build instruments, use them. Once you've assembled and built them, help organize a reporting system. Assist as your child records observations a few times a day for a week, matching your data to information from the National Weather Service or the local news. Calibrate instruments where necessary. At this point, your child may want to go back and build that barometer. Once adjustments are made, speculate about the kinds of weather that follows certain types of clouds, the rise and fall of air pressure, humidity and temperature, then test your conclusions with observations. Older children will naturally use more instruments and develop more sophisticated conclusions, but even young children can see the way weather gives clues to coming changes. When you've completed the project, you and your child will have cooperatively demystified a part of the natural world using scientific inquiry and your own resourcefulness and creativity.
