Hurricane season has arrived and this year’s is expected to be an above-average one. So, aside from all the ways this may affect our general lives, we also want to consider this time as an opportunity to start building a foundation for our kids to understand how this is a natural event and learn valuable lessons and skills in the process.

When you’re a kid, your job is to learn about the world and weather provides a great amount of interesting and fun topics, and while children are often scared of the powerful display of nature’s force involved in a storm, it is also undeniable that knowledge and preparedness is a wonderful antagonist to fear.

There are some general concepts that we think are important to communicate to our children:

• Weather and climate are closely related and affect all of our lives every day.
• There are some things in life that you can’t control, like weather,  but you can try to be prepared for them.
• Storms and thunder are a normal part of nature, as are rainbows and sunny days.

But, ¿how do we do it?.

The first and easiest step is just making observations about regular weather, children are curious and the weather is directly observable so that will make it easy to relate to and you will probably have them wondering and asking questions right away.

You can also suggest some questions, and theorize a little before helping them find the answers. Some interesting questions to answer are:

• What is the difference between a hurricane, a cyclone, a typhoon and a tropical storm?
• If a hurricane moves by itself, where does it get its power from? Why does it loose it´s power eventually?
• Where are hurricanes born?
• Who gets to put names on hurricanes?

And, of course,  there are informative and age-appropriate videos on the subject, Sesame Street had an episode about hurricanes but, for some reason, it is kind of hard to find, this is it (partially):

This Dr. Binocs video is a little newer but also very informative:

By this point, the kids should be a little bit more familiar with hurricanes and are probably ready to join the quest for preparedness. Make it a family project to review and execute basic pre-storm preparations like assembling an emergency supply kit. Although there is really good information about this all over the web, a very good site we found is maintained by the National Weather Service and contains all the documentation for the Hurricane Preparedness Week 2017.

Finally, it wouldn´t be us if we didn´t suggest a little experiment. There are wonderful weather-related experiments that you can do all over YouTube, and this one even has a tornado in it:

See? We can all make the best out of hurricane season!