Radiation: Make a circle with your hands and arms straight up over your head (mine is usually a little to the left) to represent the sun, and then your hands separate and fingers wiggle down across your body to your right hip, showing the electromagnetic waves coming down from the sun

Conduction: Make both hands into fists, and keep one still, and make the other hand-molecule crash into it so your first fist takes the energy because it was touched by the faster-moving fist-molecule.

Convection: Make pointer fingers and stir the air in front of you so while your "hot" wrist is coming up, the "cool" wrist is falling, and the cycle continues as the "cool" wrist becomes the "hot" wrist and rises again.


Does anyone have ideas for weather tools? (thermometer, barometer, psychrometer, rain gauge, anemometer). Or any ideas for climate zones (Savanna, Desert, Humid Subtropical, Humid Continental, etc).

The words we have gestures for are definitely being remembered better than the rest of their vocabulary, but now I need gestures for all of them, and I can't think of anything!

My wife has just started Whole Brain Teaching, and creates some fantastic gestures for complicated things. Her technique is to boil the the term down to a concise definition, then act out the definition as she says it. For example adjective is "an adjective describes a noun (draw a small circle in the air with your thumb and index finger together) by telling you what it looks, smells, tastes, sounds, or feels like (with thumb and index finger again, point to eyes, nose, mouth, and ears as appropriate, then open your hand and wiggle fingers for feels), or how much (turn your hand palm side up) or how many (turn your other hand palm side up the same as the first, so that the end looks like you are shrugging your shoulders).

This could be applied to making gestures for just about any complicated concept. For example, "thermometer" could be "a tool (move your hand like you are turning a screwdriver) for telling how hot (wipe your hand across your forehead) or cold (shiver like you're cold) something is." The tool part of the gesture would be repeated for the other weather tools, while the second part would be changed.

It worked! I made temperature (hold hand to your forehaed, or their friend's forehead) and heat (wave hand by face) and cold (wrap arms around yourself and move hands up and down) and stratus clouds (make hands into claws and connect thumbs and connect fingers to make a pancake shape, like a stratus cloud) and cumulus clouds (outline the mashed-potato shape) and cirrus clouds (make check-marks or "Nike symbols" in the air very high over your head) and rain (start with cumulus cloud and wiggle fingers downward) and sea breeze (wave R arm in a wiggle shape to represent flow over water) and land breeze (use L arm to go straight, because it isn't over wiggly water) and psychrometer (take your right hnad and make a fist and spin it around, like you use a sling psychrometer)and evaporation (like rain, but backwards so it goes up) and condensation (start with hands wide apart over head, then bring together and pack together, like making a snowball). We had such a good day making sentences like "a sea breeze happens during the day and is cold, but at night, the land breeze puts hot air over the water, which creates evaporation, which will condense into a cumulus cloud, which will make rainfall." Our hands had a very busy review day!